


A Contest of Stories

by alby_mangroves, hansbekhart, Scappodaqui



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Art, Bucky!Cap, Cameos by Actual Historical Figures, Canon-Typical Violence, Drawing, Ensemble Cast, Excruciating Historical Accuracy, F/M, Ghost Army, Historical Accuracy, How to Fake a Super Soldier, Howling Commandos as Ghost Army, Illustrated, Jewish Bucky Barnes, M/M, Multi, Multilingual Character, Multilingual Dialogue, No Serum Steve Rogers, POV Multiple, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Tactical Deception, Tuskegee Airmen, Wojtek the War Bear, Word Play, puns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:18:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 70,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7769896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alby_mangroves/pseuds/alby_mangroves, https://archiveofourown.org/users/hansbekhart/pseuds/hansbekhart, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Scappodaqui/pseuds/Scappodaqui
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>All actions in war take place in an atmosphere of uncertainty, or the "fog of war." Uncertainty pervades battle in the form of unknowns about the enemy, about the environment, and even about the friendly situation. While we try to reduce these unknowns by gathering information, we must realize that we cannot eliminate them—or even come close. The very nature of war makes certainty impossible; all actions in war will be based on incomplete, inaccurate, or even contradictory information.</i><br/><b><i>Having said this, we realize that it is precisely those actions that seem improbable that often have the greatest impact on the outcome of war.</i></b> </p><p> </p><p>(Warfighting, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The characters in this story roughly follow the same background and history as Hans Bekhart's [Kings County series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/233079) and Scappodaqui's [Radio series](http://archiveofourown.org/series/317915). If you'd like more Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jim Morita or just lovely, thoroughly researched historical fiction in your life, please click through!
> 
> Several languages are used throughout the story; please hover over italicized text to see the translation.

 

  


 

“Bucky!”

The word comes from very far away, drowned in pain, detached from meaning. He’s been in pain for longer than he knows now, time stretching thin like a worn rubber band. His eyes are open, probably - staring at the ceiling, at the machine that’d whirred and cut away at the other men, hanging over him like a threat. It is a threat - but they hadn’t asked him any questions, hadn’t asked any of the others questions neither, just chatted among themselves as if they hadn’t been cutting open dead bodies right there on the same table he was lying on now, _oh god,_ waiting his turn.

“Bucky!”

No.

It’s quiet now. Earlier there’d been a hubbub that he’d barely heard, drowsing, lost in pain and confusion and fear. They’d been sticking needles in him, and the needles were attached to coiling wires, and they’d shocked each muscle group in turn, that was what they’d said they were doing, cooly writing notes as he shuddered and spasmed. After they took the needles out he’d seized for hours, trying to get _Sergeant 32557038_ out through his teeth, his jaw barely loose enough for him even to whisper it.

But it’s quiet now, all of them run off, leaving the room to get darker around him. Sometimes lights flash over his face: fireworks. Sometimes there’s the rattle of gunfire, or - or a train over wooden tracks, the clatter of the elevated line in summer, far off like he used to hear it out his bedroom window and just as unimportant. He’s shivering, muscles unlocked just far enough for him to feel the cold seeping through the thin shirt they left him with, sleeves rolled up for them to get at his veins, pinned by thick leather straps to the operating table.

“Buck, wake up, _wake up_.”

No.

He doesn’t want to. He doesn’t want to hear that sickly sweet voice again, asking him to describe just how it felt to have his heart trying to beat out of his chest, or his head to hurt so bad he’d thought they’d actually cut his skull open. Then in German, in between the questions, to the other doctors: _“This formulation is rubbish anyway. How can I be expected to replicate Erskine’s formula under these conditions? You see how I am forced to work._ ” or “ _If he dies overnight, don’t wake me. The autopsy can wait until morning._ ”

“Sergeant,” he mumbles, because it made Herr Zola suck air between his teeth impatiently, and that’s about all he has left, “three two five five se -”

A hand slices through the air above him and slaps him hard across the face, twice. He grunts, surprised and strangely wounded. It doesn’t hurt but the sting of it is sharp and humiliating over the aching weight of the rest of his body. He blinks, hard: and focuses, actually sees for the first time the pale face of Steve Rogers, looming huge and anxious over him.

“Is, is that -” he asks, and Steve says, “It’s me, it’s Steve.”

“Steve,” Bucky repeats, and feels delight curl all the way through him. “Steve!”

The table shakes a little, as Steve does something he can’t see. Abruptly the straps over his legs loosen, and then the ones over his chest and stomach. There are hands all over him and after a moment Bucky realizes they’re just Steve’s hands, and stops fighting them clutching at his shoulders, pulling him up off the table.

“Steve,” Bucky says again, and slides abruptly to his knees. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even hurt.

“Come on, you gotta get up,” Steve says, but he kneels down next to Bucky and takes Bucky’s face in his hands. He’s got gloves on, and the leather is soft and good smelling, and underneath them Steve’s hands are shaking. They feel better on Bucky’s skin than anything else has in his whole life, and he leans into them, presses his cheek against Steve’s palms.

“I thought you were dead,” Steve says roughly, and touches his forehead to Bucky’s.

Bucky’s eyes have slipped closed without him noticing, and they weigh a thousand pounds when he lifts them open, Steve’s face swimming back into focus. He’s colored green from the light streaming through the windows, green like the people he paints, but with his nose and eyes in the right place. At the thought of it Steve’s eyebrows start drifting towards his chin, and his nose turns upside down. Bucky giggles.

“How’d you get here, Steve?” he asks, and puts a fingertip on Steve’s left eyebrow, tries to push it back to where it belongs.

Distracted - turned to look out back towards the hall, shoulders back, head up, one hand dropped to the gun on his belt, leaving a cold spot on Bucky’s face - Steve answers, “I joined the Army.”

Bucky lets Steve tug him up onto his feet, follows him out of the lab and into the dim hallway, crisscrossed with thick beams of light and the thin haze of smoke. It smells like smoke, but mostly it smells like a cave: cold and damp, the indefinable scent of old stone and brick. Steve’s got on a spiffy looking leather jacket Bucky’s never seen before and he looks good, he looks _good_ but it gets cold standing on subway platforms, that deep bone-biting cold you can’t do nothing about, just stand there and shiver. In the foxholes Bucky used to wake up shivering like that, dog miserable, everything in him only focused on getting warm, getting dry, getting out of there. Back home -

“Where we going, Steve?” he asks, and gets one hand on the cuff of that nice leather jacket. Steve barely slows, just tugs Bucky along down the length of the platform. Where’s the train? They’ve been waiting hours for the train to come. “We going dancing?”

“Army don’t teach dancing,” Steve answers, absent. He’s got a radio in his hand, and he’s saying urgent things into it: “Basement level, west side. No, it was blocked. Okay. Okay. They’re coming back? _Fuck_. No, it’s already done, just wait for my signal.”

“I’m not dressed,” Bucky protests, and pulls on Steve’s sleeve, gestures to himself with his other hand. He looks like a stewbum, he smells like he’s been sleeping rough on the Bowery. He pissed himself the first day in the isolation ward, after they’d put something in his veins that made him feel like his blood was boiling, pain so sharp and unreal he thought he’d die from it. They’d hosed him down but he can still smell it on himself, feel it in the stiff, grimy drag of pants and underwear against his skin. “Steve, let’s go home, I’m not dressed. Steve? Steve, let’s go home, come on.”

“ _Shit_ ,” Steve spits, and grabs Bucky by the front of his shirt, shoving both of them into a little office and Bucky up against the wall. The door’s ajar; Steve’s pressed against him from chest to knees; his hands fisted in Bucky’s shirt, holding him still.

“Aw, sugar,” Bucky says fondly, and takes hold of Steve’s hips, angles for a kiss. He sees Steve’s lips pull back from his teeth, some sort of wordless, silent hiss, and Steve covers Bucky’s mouth, and with his other hand draws a gun.

There are footsteps in the hallway, running footsteps. Shadows flicker over Steve’s face. Soldiers in the hall, eight or ten of them, tense German trickling into Bucky’s ears. He barely breathes; he’s staring at the gun in Steve’s hand, at Steve’s finger on the trigger. His nose is full of the smell of Steve’s glove, and the gunpowder stink laying on top of the leather. There’s a gun in Steve’s hand. There’s a _gun_ in Steve’s hand.

 

 

 

“Steve,” he says, muffled. Steve presses closer against him, really pinning him now, like he’s trying to shut Bucky up with his whole body. His eyes flicker over to Bucky’s and back towards the open door, waiting, listening. The footsteps pass. Then fade. No more soldiers come.

“Steve,” Bucky says again, and sticks his tongue out. Steve’s hand twitches, even though he’s got gloves on and can’t feel Bucky’s tongue sliming up his palm. It’s enough that Bucky can shake him off, lean forward into Steve’s face and ask, very quietly, “Are you real?

“Yeah, Buck,” Steve says, grave and tense. His hand drops, holds the gun ready at his side. He’s flush against Bucky, solid and real and undeniable.

“Am I dead?” Bucky asks, just as quiet. Steve shakes his head, his mouth doing something like it doesn’t know whether to turn up or down.

Bucky lets his head drop against the wall, almost too scared to hope it’s true. After a moment he reorients, keeps his head still as it tries to spin right off his neck, focuses back on Steve. “We’re not in Brooklyn,” Bucky tells him, hoarsely.

Steve looks at him. Anyone else would laugh. Steve only shakes his head again, and eases away from Bucky - who stays where he is, hands flat against the cold brick. Out the window he can still see flashing lights, and for the first time realizes that there’s a firefight going on out there, that there are tanks grinding over the wet earth and the odd searing sound the blue weapons make before they fire. They’re busting out. Being busted out, being liberated, and Steve Rogers is leading the charge.

Bucky looks him up and down, takes in the leather jacket, the olive drab underneath, the precarious helmet. “You really in the Army?” he asks, baffled. “ _How_?”

Steve grins, wide and crooked. “Tell you about it later,” he says. “We gotta go.”

They stick close together when they slip back out into the hallway. Steve leads the way, confident like he’s leading Buck around back home, all the back alleys and shortcuts locked away in the treasure map of Brooklyn he carries around in his head. The gun’s back in his hand, and Bucky’s eyes follow it, unmoored by the sight.

Steve’s holding the gun all wrong. He keeps bringing his thumb back over the stock and then slipping it over the trigger again. He holds the radio more comfortably in his free hand, and its faint crackle leaks a sound into the corridor like the inside of his lungs in winter. The sound worries Bucky. “Can you even shoot that thing?” he asks.

“I get by,” Steve says stiffly, which means no.

“Give it here,” Bucky says, and says it again a little louder when Steve doesn’t answer. They’ve moved to the interior of the factory, no more shafts of light tricking Bucky’s eyes, just a long dark canyon of cold stone and soft noises that have Steve jumping every few seconds. “C’mon, give it here, Steve.”

Steve gets it this time, and shoots a glare over his shoulder. “You ain’t even walking straight,” he says.

Bucky holds his hand out, shakes it impatiently, and after a moment Steve lays the pistol into it. “Ammunition,” Bucky tells him.

Steve hesitates. His hand clenches around the radio, his other hand around air. “That’s all there is,” Steve says, and fear squeezes Bucky’s throat.

“How many bullets left,” he says, and then, “ _Goddammit_ , Steve.”

“I lost count!” Steve hisses, like Bucky couldn’t tell from the look on his face. Damn thing’s not even cocked. Bucky pulls back on the slide and even that effort staggers him sideways into the wall, fireworks going off behind his eyes. “Bucky,” he hears from far away, and feels Steve’s hands grab his arms, and Bucky’s free hand comes up automatically to grip Steve’s elbows. He’s going to throw up.

It rolls through him like a wave, more sick terror and just plain old sickness than his body’s ever held, even after the first time he ever killed a man. He holds on to Steve, pulls himself hand over hand up that thread between them, forcing himself back into his own body. “You know which way outta here?” Bucky asks, eyes closed, teeth gritted around the wave of vomit choked back in his throat.

He wants to crush Steve against his chest, hold on to him until he’s sure Steve’s real. The pistol feels real enough in his hand, warm from being cradled in Steve’s palm. A better fit, to have it in his own.

As if on cue, the radio crackles. Bucky opens his eyes. “Barber,” the radio says, tersely. “Come in, Barber.”

Steve lifts the radio to his mouth, holding Bucky’s gaze. “Copy,” he says. “Go ahead, May.”

That’s as far as he gets: two Hydra soldiers round the corner, moving quickly and quietly, guns up but not forward, and Bucky shoots one in the throat and the other in the gut, one quick step forward to put another bullet in his chest, right over the heart. The first one doesn’t die right off; he thrashes about, gurgling in that way Bucky’s learned means he’s drowning in his own blood. Before he might’ve put the man out of his misery, but now he just stares down at the pistol in disgust, mourning the extra bullet.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Steve exhales, the sound of it muted by the crack of the gun in the narrow tunnel. Bucky reaches up, scratches at his ears, comes away tacky. He stares it, the gray smudge of blood on his fingertips in the shadowed corridor. He looks over at Steve, who’s watching him wide eyed, and for a moment comes unstuck again: Prospect Park, dappled sunlight across Steve’s face, the sound of a gramophone calling across the grass, taking Steve’s hand in his own -

Steve takes his hand, and when they hurry past the bodies of the Hydra soldiers, Bucky doesn’t spit on the dead one, or the one he’s leaving to die slow and alone in the darkness.

Three bullets on the Krauts they surprised back there: no more than four left in the magazine, if Steve had fired only a single shot. He lets Steve take the lead, his vision strobing in and out, his hands shaking around the pistol. His feet too large for his body, his limbs stone, scuffling clumsily over the cold brick.

Steve’s flat out running by the time they reach the factory floor, and Bucky manages to shoulder past him to be the first one through the door, pistol up and ready. There’s nothing, and for a moment Bucky’s frozen, stunned by the silence: no clanking machinery, no watchful footstep on the catwalk above, no shallow, choked breathing of the men next to him. There, the assembly station where Bucky had been beaten until he couldn’t stand. Where Herr Zola had sniffed and shrugged and said, “Might as well bring him down,” and then the guards had dragged Bucky away. But Steve’s here now, treading right over the spot Bucky had thrown blood up all over the floor, leading the way to, to -

Bucky stumbles hard on the metal-grated steps. He stares through the rusty metal to the fuel cylinders below. Someone’s dropped something on the floor. It takes a moment for him to realize the heap of clothing is someone’s body. A prisoner or a guard, he can’t tell, because smoke’s begun to filter across his vision: smoke or the fine bewildering screen of sunspots - like when he squinted up too long at the sky, as if he could see the sky; how he’d been able, when his vision blurred like this, to believe it was warmth he felt.

It is warm, though. Steve’s hand lands on his arm, pulling him up; maybe that’s the heat, his hand, a comfort. Steve meanwhile still on his radio, which crackles. The faint voice Bucky hears on the other end has changed.

“Pops,” Steve is saying. “It’s time to celebrate.”

Celebrate, Bucky thinks vaguely, and then the factory explodes around them.

He’ll realize later that Steve must have busied himself planting explosives before coming to look for Bucky, but what he thinks of at the time is the Fourth of July. They go off in each corner of the factory floor and all the places in between, thudding in his chest like fireworks, that fire spreading thick and hot through Schmidt’s machinery. Stingingly hot, like the sun in summer or a fever in winter or the scald of water from a kettle spitting steam.

He flings an arm over Steve’s head by reflex, but Steve shakes him off. He’s got the radio up and almost trips himself, looking around. His cheeks look flushed and his mouth is open the way it does when he’s trying to get a better breath, like he’s about to have an attack of wheezing. “We’re going to get you out of here,” he says. “Come on.”

They ascend the stairs. Steve pushes Bucky up ahead of him, one hand on his ass, and Bucky feels laughter climbing his throat but then has to focus on not tripping and falling down the steps. His hands fumble for railings. His legs feel weak, the inner twang of them gone as slack as if he’s just run a race. Or as if in a nightmare, where the finish line brings just another start, and again, and again.

“Roger that,” Steve says on the radio, and Bucky says, “Ha, Rogers.”

“You okay?” Steve says, ignoring the joke, though Bucky hears a strain in his voice like worry, worry that he’s making a joke, that he’s not here, so he tucks his chin down and clambers up the last step.

“Who’s that?” Bucky asks, trying to be serious.

“The cavalry,” Steve says, and when Bucky throws a glance over his shoulder Steve’s giving him a look. “What’d you think, it was just me?”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, at least is going to until he looks up and sees - who is that - no, he knows who that is. It’s Herr Zola and Herr Schmidt, making their own way up the rickety steps towards the roof.

Far away, Bucky hears muffled crashing, cracking, a boom, a hiss. He’s gotten used to the sounds of explosions from the battlefield but this is different, this is like the creak of an oil tanker, like rusty pipes, pressure letting loose. So much pressure inside this factory and yes, now he hears it. Shell impact is different outside because all you hear’s the whistle, really, the whine, the roar. Inside it’s as if the explosions take place in a drum. The thump-thud redoubles. As always, he’s not exactly scared. He’s thinking: I have to tell someone about this. This sound, it’s unlike any other sound. This is an unbelievable thing. I will have to get out and tell Steve about it. Except Steve is hearing it too.

Steve slams right into him, barely rocking Bucky off his feet. He looks but he’s slower to see through the smoky gap in the platform. The radio still crackles, pressed to his good ear. He has his head tipped, intent. He sees Herr Zola and Herr Schmidt.

“Hey!” Steve shouts.

No, Bucky want to say, no, _no_ , but Herr Schmidt pauses in their headlong flight up the stairs, and turns and looks across at them. So does Herr Zola. Schmidt’s glare skewers Steve first and then flicks to Bucky; his look of puzzlement turns into a peculiar smile.

He says, “ _Ich hatte große Hoffnungen für diese Formel. Sie sollten keine Probleme haben, das Ergebnis im nächsten Labor zu wiederholen, oder?_ ”

Steve doesn’t understand German - he’s limited to smatter of Yiddish he’s picked up from Bucky’s family, can say ‘meshuggana’ mostly because Bucky calls him this all the time, meshuggana, crazy idiot, a term of affection. But he squares up anyway and says, “Stop! If you surrender now, we won’t harm you. “ __Geben Sie auf__ ,” he says. His voice sounds hoarse and low in the gloom, and Zola and Schmidt stare at him. Bucky grabs for Steve’s shoulder.

Schmidt shrugs and hefts his gun. Nonchalant, as if there isn’t fire below his feet, in the way he does everything. Once Bucky saw him blow casually into the fingers of his gloves before sliding them back on, and then shoot a new prisoner in the head. Not even straight between the eyes, but carelessly like he’d been backhanding someone across the face. Bucky’d never even learned the name of the dead man, he’d been so fresh; no one had known, and then they’d had to pick his body up and put him out with the rest.

Now Schmidt’s smile looks frozen, puzzled. He says to Zola, _"Dazu ist es mittlerweile bei den amerikanischen Truppen gekommen? Schade, dass wir ihn nicht mitnehmen können um zu sehen, was Sie tun können, um ihn zu… verbessern."_

 _Meshuggana_ , Bucky thinks, because Steve has planted himself and continued, shouting heedless across the walkway between their platform and Schmidt’s. “You may not respect the Geneva Conventions -” and of course they don’t, Bucky can tell that Steve has seen the factory, he knows they don’t, “- but we do. If you surrender and come with us, we won’t do you harm.”

Schmidt’s head snaps back like he’s been punched. Steve smiles, reflexively - relieved. But then Bucky sees that, like Max Shmeling when he faced Joe Louis, this snapback is the prelude only to renewed onslaught. Schmidt’s head is tipped back because he’s begun to laugh.

“Charming,” Schmidt says, in English this time, “but we must be off.” He nods at Zola, who’s staring at Bucky - who points one tremulous finger across the smoky air, his spectacles glinting in the dim, reddish light.

Bucky feels it like a blow to the heart. His knees go weak. He grabs at the railing to steady himself and remembers, belatedly, he’s still got the gun in his other hand. They’re in range. He can make the shot easily. He can -

He doesn’t. His hands shake. His finger’s on the trigger. He can -

“You’re not going anywhere,” Steve says. When Bucky looks over at him he’s got his eyes locked on Schmidt and Zola, backs turned, making leisurely progress up the stairs, like they know exactly how much they’ve got to fear. Steve hits the button on the radio. He probably can’t even hear whoever’s on the other side; it’s pressed up against his good ear. He says, “Light it up.” There’s a pause, a crackle, and he says, more urgently: “Yeah, I’m sure - I got eyes on the Skull, _light it up_.”

“Steve,” Bucky says, but it’s drowned out by a sudden boom. The platform shakes, shakes like they’re really on a train, and Bucky almost loses his grip on his gun, and Schmidt and Zola are rocked backwards too, all of them awash in red light, glaring like sparklers, like flares he sees in the night when planes dip to strafe them. They assembled those planes in factories like this. Bucky sometimes tried to make sure - they all did - that the shells they stocked in their bellies were duds.

That hadn’t ended well for him. Anyway, whatever’s gone off now was not a dud.

The world shakes again. Steve’s yelling something that Bucky can’t hear: he’s still looking across the platform at Zola, Zola’s turned around, he’s on his way up the tunnel on the other side, and Bucky has to do it, he has to shoot. He never misses; he almost never misses. He brings up the pistol, still cocked, and sets up to shoot and -

\- the platform tilts and trembles. Bucky’s pitched forward like a start in track. Forward. The gun spirals out of his grasp and plummets so fast he can almost believe a part of himself went with it, like his heart has dropped out of his gut, a rollercoaster feeling. He lurches forward but there’s another blast and it’s too late, he’s falling -

It occurs to him in a moment that because he’s let go of the gun, he can grab for the railing instead and this choice, if it is a choice, saves him. He’s hanging now by one arm, swinging, and he’s deliriously weak. Searing heat buffets him. Then he feels the clasp of Steve’s hand on his arm and there’s Steve, both hands wrapped around Bucky’s.

“Hang on,” Steve says, throaty with strain. He’s not strong enough to pull Bucky’s weight, even as thin as he’s gotten in the factory, but it’s not stopping him: he’s hanging on with all he’s got, boots skidding over the metal. Bucky wants to answer something sarcastic, because it’s not like he’s going to let go, but he doesn’t. Instead what Bucky thinks is this: that he can’t let himself go, he can’t leave Steve. So really, maybe it is Steve who pulls him up.

He swings up his free hand. He feels the jackknife in his own aching ribs as he turns his body into a folding blade and flips himself up onto the platform. He slams into Steve and they roll backwards, landing with Steve on top of him. Bucky groans.

“You’re all right,” Steve says, staring down at him.

“Unh,” Bucky says.

“You’ll be all right,” Steve says firmly. “I can get us out.”

“How?” Bucky motions across the gaping divide between platforms, now licked by flame.

Steve looks around, like he hadn’t noticed - his eyes flickering over the stairs, the hell below them, the little windows too high above his head. He gets to his feet, stricken. Bucky’s coughing, crying from the smoke, the grating under his back starting to burn, but then -

“There’s an air duct!” he shouts, and then coughs too, bent over with coughing even as he reaches for Bucky’s hand. And there is, one level down where the catwalk dips over the big machinery and hugs the wall. The duct’s hidden behind a hanging banner with the twin icons of swastika and hydra on it, and smoldering but not yet on fire. Bucky pulls it back and Steve throws his whole body hard against a panel until it gives. The opening that appears is narrow. They tussle briefly and Steve finally has to push Bucky ahead of him to get him to enter first.

“Stay behind me,” Bucky says.

“I’m right here,” Steve says back, and shoves him again.

Inside the duct it’s black and grimy and feels exactly like the inside of his head except that it keeps surprising him with hidden bumps to remind him that it's not as easy to navigate. He pays close attention to where he puts his hands. As they move further away from the fire, icy cold grows on his palms, numbing him. He wishes he could turn to see if Steve is all right, why he’s so quiet, why the whole world is so quiet.

He hits the end of the line head first, skull knocking painfully against something he can’t see. He goes down onto his elbows, clutching at the hurt for a second. Steve says, “What? What is it?” and Bucky says, “Hang on,” and then he’s scooting awkwardly onto his butt so he can kick once - twice - and then the grate goes sailing off into space and Steve and Bucky go tumbling after it.

He hits the ground and Steve lands on top of him, knocking the wind out of his lungs. There’s an open sky over his head for the first time in weeks, months, he doesn’t even know how long, and it’s with the last of his strength that he lets Steve get him up on his feet and hustle them both towards the treeline and cover. Falls again, mud churned up under his hands and smearing all over his face, wet forest smell, that’s all she wrote, and the radio in Steve’s belt crackles to life.

“Barber!” it says, frantic. “Barber, come in!”

“I’m here, May,” Steve says into it, somewhere Bucky can’t see, crouched over him from the sound of it. “We’re both here.”

“Oh thank god,” May says fervently. “All clear, we’re regrouping as planned.”

“Gonna need a minute,” Steve says, and his knees make two dull thuds in the earth as he sits heavily next to Bucky’s head. Blindly, Bucky reaches up, and after a second he feels Steve’s skinny, bony hand wrap around his own and hang on tight.

“Whoever’s on that radio sounds just like Mabel May,” Bucky says wonderingly, and from a distance he hears Steve laugh.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

It’s the smell he notices first. Not the medicinal smell of the lab they’d kept him in, but the smell of cold mud. He wakes up with an inward suck of air almost like a hoarse sob of relief; time spools backwards and here he is in a medical tent in the field, maybe near Salerno, which was rain-damp and smelled of rotten grapevines and blood - blood, which is a scent not unlike wet earth. He lies there for a moment with his eyes closed, taking inventory of his body. His spinal cord licks like flame. His head swarms with color. His back tooth aches where they forced his mouth open - 

He opens his eyes and struggles up onto one elbow. He’s on the ground; the earth gives under him. There are soldiers he doesn’t recognize all around and a tarp ceiling on sticks up above and it’s dim but then he sees a face over him. 

“Barnes?”

Bucky shakes his head. His throat’s raw. “Well, shit,” he says, “I’m not in Kansas, am I.”

Morita’s making that face Bucky remembers from the trenches, when he was trying to ignore a bad joke, but Jim can’t quite manage it. His lips press together instead and he nods. “Not that you’d know from Kansas,” he says. Bucky’s entire lack of geographical knowledge had been a running joke among the group of them in the factory prison. The rest of them reminisced about home and all Bucky could say was, Fresno? That’s near Los Angeles, right?

He sits up and rubs at the side of his jaw where a scruff of beard chafes his fingertips. One of his ears feels clogged; he puts his hand up and it comes away sticky with blood. His shirt’s gone. His chest and ribs are a landscape of scabs and bruises.

“No infections,” Morita says briefly, eyes tracking down over Bucky’s skin. He says just that, he doesn’t comment on the extent of the damage, the places the Germans decided to crush in ground glass for no particular reason Bucky could make out. 

“That’s lucky,” Bucky says hollowly, passing a thumb lightly over the inside of his wrist.

“Well, I cleaned ‘em all out and put sulfa on anyway.” Morita shakes his head. “That’s about all we got; we ran out of morphine. Don’t think they expected there to be so many of us.”

He’s staring down at Bucky’s chest again. Bucky asks, “Where’s my shirt?” 

Morita passes it to him silently, and after Bucky’s pulled his head through, he looks around. There’re about twenty of them spread out in this low-hanging tent. The shadows of black tree branches shine through through overhead, thick: someone’s covered it up with brush. 

Twenty of them, when there were hundreds in the factory. Bucky tries to reassure himself by remembering that these are just the wounded. “How’re…” He pauses. He’s not going to ask who made it, not yet. “Did I hit my head or was there a real skinny guy around, maybe five-foot-nothing?”

Morita does smile then, scratching his head. “Yeah, sure was. And a lady spy. That’s who came to the rescue when we radioed out.”

“Oh!” Bucky smiles back, dazed. “You got it to work?”

“Bitch of a thing, but finally we did. They were using the British codes, so we had Monty transmit, and this is what we got. Kinda funny bunch.”

“But they did it,” Bucky says. 

Morita shrugs. “Here,” he says, handing Bucky some water, which stings the inside of his lips and throat with cold. He gulps it and hears his stomach groan, hunger and thirst awakening along with the rest of him. “Say,” Jim continues, taking the cup back when Bucky’s done. “That skinny guy, who is he?”

“My friend,” Bucky says. “Well, Steve.”

He told Jim about Steve, back in the factory when he was sick and Jim got him water and Bucky thought he was gonna die. Now, remembering, he isn’t sure if he really did believe it - the depth of his belief that he was going to die, and his trust in that belief, have been shattered. Anyway, he told Jim, and Jim looked at him funny and asked if he wore dresses back home, and then showed him a locket with a picture of his girl. So long story short he knows about Steve.

“Huh.” Jim looks like he’s about to say something else, but shuts his mouth; the flap of the tarp has moved and Monty and Dernier come in. Dernier is smudged with soot, as always. Monty’s hair stands up in forlorn wisps around an encroaching bald spot. 

“Thus far,” Monty says drily, settling in next to them on his haunches, “you Americans continue to live up to your reputation for indiscipline.” He looks to Dernier in the hope of support: while the Frenchman and the Englishman had little in common and twice came almost to blows over De Gaulle, Monty was one of the only ones in the prison with more than a smattering of French, and thus the de facto translator on more than one occasion. Like when he had to talk Dernier out of smuggling lignite out of the factory and into their cell. Now Dernier clears his throat and says something in French, then turns to Bucky, a grin lifting the drooping corners of his mouth. 

“Au moins,” Dernier says, “they know how to set a fire.”

Morita shakes his head but says nothing, turning instead to check on a man who’s started to make gurgling groaning sounds. A throat wound, Bucky thinks, and shuts his eyes, trying not to think of the time he saw a Greek soldier in the field take shrapnel just under the jaw. They’d been stuck up a hill behind a pile of rocks and under heavy fire, and Bucky had waited there, listening to the whizz and thrum of shells - from close to the sound they made was peculiar, a  _ plink-plink-plink _ , a sound you didn’t get to hear at other distances. It had taken the Greek soldier four hours to die, and he’d talked in a low mumble with just this gurgling undertone for three.

Sulfa has no smell or taste. Bucky nonetheless remembers the feel of it sprinkled into a wound: a grittiness that dissolves. He watches Morita dress the soldier, a guy he doesn’t recognize, who lies there just as complacent as if they had morphine after all. “Did you hear anything?” Morita asks Monty.

“They still haven’t said,” Monty says.

“What?” Bucky asks, distracted. He thinks maybe he does recognize the injured soldier, or maybe he doesn’t. What is true is that all wounded men look alike, white or Negro or Japanese, and he has noticed this throughout the war: that something about the uniforms and the ground-in dirt and the gauntness of their faces, the expression that is halfway childish yearning and halfway deep emptiness: that is the same.

“We’re still quite close to the factory,” Monty says. “We haven’t yet heard when we’re moving out. Frankly, I don’t know if we haven’t gone out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

Dernier’s smile fades, but Bucky gathers his feet underneath himself. “Don’t worry,” he tells them, “Steve’s got a plan.”

 

-

 

“We need a new plan,” Dugan says, ducking under the canvas flap. It’s not much, just a bit of tarp from a Hydra truck that had come out of last night mostly intact, barely enough to keep the rain off their shoulders.

“Why’s that,” Steve says, eyes on the map spread out across the makeshift table they’ve set up. “There a problem?”

“A big one,” Dugan says. “About two hundred and forty three big.”

Steve looks up, takes in Dugan’s grim expression. Gabe whistles, low. “Well,” Peggy says. “Well. I’d say this was quite a successful mission.”

“Fifty nine wounded,” Dugan continues, remorseless. He settles in on his haunches. “Twelve bad enough they ain’t going anywhere on their own steam. Three that the uh, medic thinks won’t last more’n a few hours. Just about everyone half starved. Squid bastards were set on working ‘em all to death, seems like.”

Steve sighs. He flicks an eye over to Gabe, who straightens, rolling out his shoulders. “One tank,” he reports. “Six working half tracks, but only two with fuel worth mentioning. No rations except what we brought with us.”

“There’s a stream about half a kilometer away,” Peggy says. “We should send some men that way with the truck before it’s full light. I believe I saw a cistern near the - what’s left of the south wall of the facility.”

Steve nods, and Dugan groans up to his feet without a word, vanishing back into the mist. Steve traces a fingertip over the map. It’s unmarked, like everything else they carry. It’s only in Steve’s head that the thin, tenuous ribbon of the Allied front line marks home.

“Thirty five miles,” Steve says, staring down at it. “Defensive positions as of three days ago here -” he touches the map, shifts one finger just barely to the left, a little further, “ - here and here.”

“No sign on the radio they realized we’ve hit the factory,” Gabe says, but he sounds unsure. The dummy codes they’d sent had been enough to lure nearly the full Hydra battalion away from the factory, but without the fake radio chatter of Allied forces on the move that usually accompanies this sort of performance, it was only a matter of time before the Germans guessed what was going on. 

“I’ll scout ahead,” Peggy says. She’s bent close over the map as well, and he can feel the warmth of her shoulder against his own. “Dugan and Steve can follow with the equipment.”

“We need Dugan with the rescuees,” Gabe says, and Peggy sighs, frustrated. 

“We might’ve planned a bit better,” she admits. “Brought at least one other person they might actually take orders from.”

“No one to guard the rear either,” Gabe says, shaking his head. “And we can’t keep them massed together. We’d be sitting ducks out here, trying to move all these people at once. We gotta split ‘em up.”

“That’s the problem,” Steve says, “we need more - ”

He looks over his shoulder. Still some yards off, Bucky’s head goes up. He meets Steve’s eyes square, not pausing as he picks his way through the trees and the knots of soldiers huddled listlessly around. He’s bearded and dirty, his hair standing up in clumps. Mentally Steve starts to sketch him: the slash of his mouth, the rangy, bony look of his torso, the breadth of his forearms. Shoulders back, chest out. He’s never seen Buck move like this. He watches, fascinated.

 

 

He can feel that Gabe and Peggy are looking back and forth between him and Buck. Well, it’s different now, isn’t it? They have their orders. But - “It’s okay,” Steve says to them. “Someone else they’ll listen to, right?”

“He’s - trustworthy,” Gabe says to Peggy, a world of meaning in the little pause between the two words, and in the look they give each other before Peggy answers.

“All right,” she says. It’s a little unwilling, but she’s got even more to lose than the two of them. Immediate execution would be the very most she could hope for, should her work be compromised. Without looking away from Bucky, Steve reaches out and touches her hand. She turns it over and grips his tightly.

It takes Bucky a moment to see who else is crouched under the tarp with Steve. His jaw’s working in a way that always spelled trouble for Steve back home, but it goes slack when he sees Peggy, and his expression going from confused to downright dumbfounded when he catches sight of Gabe.

“You looking to catch flies?” Gabe says. 

Bucky shuts his trap abruptly, scratching a hand over his hair. His fingertips come off shiny with oil, and he rubs them against his shirt, covered with grease and what Steve thinks is probably dried blood.

“Come on, sit down,” Steve says, and Bucky hesitates. He’s listing a little to the left, his eyes glassy. On his upended ammunition box, Gabe draws himself upright and that seems to decide it: Buck settles down onto the ground across the table from the three of them, rubbing both hands on his knees.

“You still ain’t dead, Buck,” Steve tells him, when Bucky doesn’t say anything else, just keeps looking up at Gabe, that dumb, cow-eyed look on his face.

“Thought that was you on the radio,” he says, and shakes his head. “Mab - Gabe. I’ll be damned.” 

“Nice to see you too, Barnes,” Gabe says, smiling. 

Steve clears his throat. “We got a problem,” he says, and Bucky’s focus sharpens on him.

“You didn’t think there were gonna be so many of us,” he says. 

“Our best intelligence said no more than fifty,” Peggy says.

Bucky shrugs. “There was a group of about forty arrived about a week ago. British. They came from -“ He leans over the map, studies it for a second. Taps a finger along the back seam of Italy’s boot, on the coast. “They’d intercepted a shipment of munitions from the factory, but were overpowered.”

“Really?” Peggy asks, with interest. “Do you know where else they were moving weapons to?” 

Bucky shakes his head. “They had me in the lab for the last - I dunno. Five, maybe six days. They were experimenting on prisoners, trying to replicate some formula. Didn’t say what for, just -” 

Peggy looks intrigued. “A formula, you say?” she asks. “Was there a man there - short, balding? With glasses?” 

Bucky looks back up, his expression blank, and Steve’s breath comes short. So that was who’d been standing behind Schmidt. He’d seen Arnim Zola through the flames, and hadn’t known. Had no idea that was who’d put Bucky on that slab and left him for dead - drugged out of his mind, in  _ pain _ \- 

“Peg,” Steve says. They both look at him - Peggy’s mouth twisting, irritated. Bucky with hooded eyes. “Debrief him later, we need to get moving.”

“All right, Steve,” Peggy says after a moment, and folds her hands up in her lap. 

Bucky’s still looking at him, unwavering. God, it’s good to see him. Steve feels bowled over by it. How long has it been? He’d stopped counting the days out of self preservation. “What’s the story?” Bucky asks.

Steve looks down at the map. Gabe and Peggy look down at it too. Outside of the tent and the meager protection it offers, he can hear the camp waking up, the sound of two hundred men muffled by the damp earth and his bad ear. The engine of a truck sputters a little, turns over, and rattles off into silence: Dugan and the cistern. Thirty five miles. Defensive positions here and here, a gap of about three miles between them, assuming - 

They can’t assume.

“Split up the men into platoons, leave a half mile between each group,” he says. “It’ll take longer to travel that way, but I’ll take stealth over speed. Bucky and I’ll scout ahead. We’ll radio back our orders. Gabe, you and Dugan will go ahead of the first platoon, with our equipment. Lay down some tracks in case Hydra realizes what’s going on.”

Gabe’s already shaking his head. Peggy’s only looking at him, her mouth tight. Thinking exactly what Gabe is about to say. “Bucky,” Steve says. “The men you were held with. There’s someone that knows their way around a radio, right? We need more bodies,” he says to Gabe and Peggy. “We need radio chatter to keep them off our tail. We need men we can trust.”

Gabe looks down at the map, his mouth drawn thin. Reluctantly, Peggy nods. “Good,” Steve says. “Five groups of soldiers. We’ll need one or two in charge of each group, and a couple to guard the rear. We’ll put your radioman with the front platoon, along with the wounded and the two halftracks. We’ll need -”

“We’ll need a guard,” Gabe says flatly. In the morning light, slanting sideways through their little tent, his eyes look gold and very clear. He’s a handsome man, Steve thinks, as he does quite often - and mostly these days without a touch of bitterness. “Dugan and I, we’ll need guards. The radio too.”

Steve nods. “Bucky,” he says, but how to put it? The words form themselves like little needles on his tongue. He feels like the glint of a sniper’s glass far off in the trees, a cowardly warning. Bucky had landed in Italy, was slogging through miles of muddy countryside in the last letter Steve got before he’d shipped out himself, fighting for every inch of it. A good soldier’s work. But that’s not what Steve’s business is, in the war.

“We need someone - very trustworthy,” Steve says, carefully. “The equipment that Gabe and Dugan carry can’t fall into Nazi hands. Gabe and Dugan can’t fall into Nazi hands. None of us can.”

Bucky looks up, surprise written in his eyebrows, the slackness of his jaw. He looks at Gabe, and at Peggy, his expression shifting. Steve rubs a thumb over his own fingers, soothing the itch. Outside the tent it’s getting lighter and colder, the drizzly rain slacking off. Might be a clear day for the march after all - threading two hundred men through some of the most fortified territory in Europe without even a damn cloud cover to grace them.

“I’ll do it,” Bucky says, and Steve flinches. “I know who else to ask.”

“Bucky,” he starts to say, but Bucky shakes his head. 

“No. I’ll do it. But,” he says, and then holds up a finger, his head tilted towards Peggy, and Gabe, and then Steve himself - “ _ What’s the story? _ ”

 

-

 

They can tell Bucky only half the story, of course - not even that. First, Peggy asks him to find the men who engineered the rescue from inside the cells: Jim, Monty, and Dernier. A dull rattling hail has begun to fall onto the canopy of their tent while they all crouch to speak, and Steve sends up his thanks for this, at least.

Peggy asks for details of the men’s lives and experience. 

“Farmer,” Morita says briefly. Dernier grunts and nods, then looks up with a hint of humor and says, “ _Mais j’ai déraciné tant de souches -_ ” He spits. “ _Tant de souches, des Boches, qui m’ont voulu déraciner autant._

Gabe smiles, to Dernier’s startlement; Gabe looks at him and offers, “ _En France, j’entends, le sol ne nourrisse pas bien les Boches._ ”

Dernier blinks twice and then smiles. “ _Le sol? Le mienne est pleine de mines. On espérerait qu’ils mangent à leur faim de cela._ ”

“He blew up some of the machinery in the factory. And he almost blew our cell,” Bucky says, and Steve no ds.

“Oh, sorry,” Gabe says. He’s not sorry, still smiling at Dernier. Back in New York, he used to talk endlessly about Paris - the Paris of Négritude, of Langston Hughes and Alain Locke. He had some  ambitions about going there himself, and when he talked to Steve about joining up, they had joked about liberating Paris. They have now liberated one French farmer, Steve supposes, which is a start. “He said he planted explosives on his farm,” Gabe says, in English, “for the Boche - the Germans.”

Dernier nods and says, “I know how to remake these mines or these objects the SOE drop for us.”

“Resistance, eh?” Dugan says. Steve knows where that’s going; Dugan doesn’t think much of the French. Or the Brits. Or anyone who isn’t American. “Didn’t put up much of a fight for old Par-ee, though.”

Dernier starts forward, glaring, and Peggy says, “Enough,” mildly - but Dugan settles down, because he’s been the target of her anger before. Steve catches Bucky and the Japanese man, Jim Morita, exchanging looks.

“His name ain’t Dum Dum for no reason,” Steve says. 

“Fine, fine,” Dum Dum says.

Peggy raises an eyebrow. “Well, then,” she says, thoughtfully. “And you?” she says to Monty.

“I was an actor,” he says, and Dugan rolls his eyes before Steve skewers him with a glance: before the Army, Dugan was in the damn circus, and hardly in a position to judge.

“Interesting,” Peggy - who judges all she likes - says.

“He pretended to fall down on the assembly line so I could get the radio equipment,” Jim says. 

“Il est coullu,” Dernier allows. 

“He’s great with strategy,” Bucky says.

Monty shrugs. “I’ve also come home from twenty three parachute drops,” he says, with elaborately false modesty. “I’m with her Majesty’s 1st Airborne Division.”

“So. We also have a sniper who’s been used as a scout before,” Steve says. This is true, as Bucky has told him: his track background meant he was often sent ahead of his platoon to scout the terrain. Bucky wrote Steve about this experience with some humor: _me, a guy who still calls ‘north’ ‘uptown’_.

“And we have a radio expert. Farming proves unexpectedly fertile ground for technologists,” Peggy muses. “Morita, you say you think you could rig a signal jammer?”

He shakes his head. “Our equipment didn’t make it out of the factory.”

Peggy looks at Steve. She nods, briefly, and turns back to the group Bucky’s assembled for them. “We have a few things you may be able to use,” she says carefully. “But first we should tell you a little bit about what we do. Officially, it’s known as called tactical deception. We impersonate other units to give the impression of a greater force, or to misdirect the location of actual troops. Our methods are top secret and cannot be divulged without great risk.”

It’s the same speech they give to officers who need to know what they’re doing on his battlefield, more or less. Sometimes they know about the sonic troops, sometimes they’ve heard of the camofleurs, but mostly not.  _ We’re here to  _ _ deceive the Germans. While your troops go left, we’ll make them think you went right. We will create a great multitude, a sound of many waters and peals of thunder, saying “Hallelujah, and death to fascism.” _

Bucky looks skeptical, but he keeps his thoughts to himself, and his friends are eager to exact their revenge. Officially, they set off at 0745; Steve and Bucky leave camp while Dugan, Falsworth and Dernier rouse the prisoners and set them into groups. The noise is quick to fade in the misty, thin air, leaving just the soft sound of their footsteps and the  _ plunk plunk _ of hail against Steve’s helmet.

It’s full light, and a miserable march; the hail has changed its mind and become rain again, and the path is muddy enough that their boots sink into the earth - but at least they still have boots. Some of the rescued soldiers salvaged some, Steve knows, off dead Hydra guards. He recognized the boot leather.

Bucky’s stumbling a little, trailing along behind Steve like they’re connected by an invisible string. He’s three steps behind whenever Steve looks back though - no more, no less. “They really did a number on you, huh,” Steve says, after they’ve been walking about a quarter mile.

Bucky doesn’t say anything. His fingers rasp over the rifle he’s carrying. Steve glances over his shoulder and sees Bucky three steps back shaking ice crystals out of his hair. Two steps and they stand together for a moment, just long enough that Steve can feel the heat of him before Bucky moves past, eyes flickering through the trees. It’s quiet. There won’t be any Germans for miles, if their defensive positions haven’t changed; if their patrols haven’t changed;  _ if, if, if _ . 

“You never were in Fort Wayne, were you?” Bucky asks suddenly, startling Steve almost as badly as plowing into him does a moment later.

Bucky takes a hasty step backwards, like he wasn’t expecting it either. He raises the rifle to his shoulder, as if a Nazi could have snuck up on them in that moment. He’s breathing like he just ran a mile. 

Steve looks away, down the trail. Twelve letters stamped Fort Wayne, Indiana, pages describing wheat fields and land so flat and empty you could see for miles, more stars in the night sky than he’d ever dreamed about. Dumb stories about how dull it was to be a chaplain’s assistant, jokes he cobbled together from Dugan, who was the only one of them who really associated much with the real soldiers. Steve had been in New York the whole time, way the hell up north near the Canadian border.

“I read those letters every night since I been here,” Bucky says without looking, like he knows exactly what Steve’s thinking.

“Buck,” Steve says. It comes out softer than he means it to, and he clears his throat roughly, turns it into a cough.

He fumbles the tin out of his pack, and a little white pill into his numb hands. Bucky steps closer, hands him a canteen even as he looks curiously at what Steve’s taking. Neither of them really look at the other. Around the canteen, Steve’s hands are red and blotchy. He had gloves, but he’d forgotten all about them in the mad dash to the tent he shared with Gabe and Dugan, the scramble to gather as much equipment as they could before anyone cottoned on. God only knew what waited for them back behind the lines. 

“We were lucky to get to write letters at all,” he says, and after the water and the pill his voice sounds mostly steady. “We don’t have the same rules, like the rest of the Army. It’s different for us. We’re an irregular unit.”

“You’d have to be,” Bucky says, his mouth twisted up.

Steve says, “If I weren’t here, where would you be?”

At that, Bucky  _ laughs _ \- actually throws his head back and laughs, but he grins down like Steve’s part of the joke too, so Steve uncurls his fists and grins back. “Meshuggana,” he says, soft. “How’d you even get here?”

“On a boat, same as you,” Steve says, and Bucky rolls his eyes. Steve relents. “Agent Carter infiltrated a few days ago. She was able to get us into the factory undetected. They don’t keep a large force here … they can’t afford the men. But you probably knew that.”

Bucky nods and turns back to the path, slogging sightlessly through mud that Steve’s forced to pick a careful path through. “Yeah, we saw the same guards a lot. How - how’d you know to come?”

“We got a radio signal. It mentioned the names of some units.” Morita’s plan, Steve knows now - a tremulous band of hope just loud enough for Peggy to have stumbled upon, searching hopelessly for a double agent that was almost certainly dead.

Bucky doesn’t look back. The rifle’s braced against his shoulder, the barrel pointed up towards an invisible enemy. “You knew mine was one of ‘em?”

It’s a dumb question, and Steve lets it be, watches the shift of Bucky’s shoulders as he takes that in. “Guess all the stupid’s right here now, then,” he says finally.

“Guess so,” Steve says, and follows. 

 

-

 

Steve calls a halt when night falls. Dugan and Falsworth take a halftrack and the radios, easing everyone’s mind. They’ll keep moving for another hour or two, transmitting on the German frequencies. All clear, nothing to worry about here: following what they can only hope is the normal patrol of the thin force stationed at the factory.

Back home Bucky always fell asleep quickly, had done ever since they were little. Steve’s expecting it, waiting for Bucky to slide into unconsciousness as soon as they rejoin the main group, or make a sad meal over whatever supplies they’d been able to scavenge from Hydra. But he doesn’t. He sits with his back against a tree and both hands on a rifle, and eventually Steve squeezes his shoulder and goes to find Peggy.

Bucky had talked, on their march - about the Skull and Zola, about the operating table Steve had found him strapped to. What they’d been doing to him on it. Bucky had rolled up his sleeves and showed Steve countless faded needle marks along his arms. He’d pulled away when Steve had reached to touch them, and rubbed fitfully at his ears. The sun had been high overhead by the time they’d stopped sluggishly leaking blood.

And he’d said -

Steve leads Peggy into the woods, until the camp is a distant murmur. This far behind the line they don’t have to worry about mines. She waits, and when he touches her wrist she lets him draw her close.

“Hydra doesn’t know Erskine’s dead,” Steve says into her ear. He hardly whispers it, but her spine stiffens. “They think we have him. They think the formula’s complete.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. “That formula was a fantasy, you know that,” she says. “Steve, they can’t possibly believe …” She trails off, as if she can’t even think of a way to say it that won’t sound ridiculous: a magical serum. A soldier who could end the war for whichever side made him first.

“They would,” Steve says. “They already do.”

Her eyes glisten in the starlight, wet looking. “They were trying replicate it on your friend,” she says, and he nods. 

“They think it worked,” Steve says. “They were surprised he was still alive.”

“Mmm,” Peggy says. “So am I.”

 

_ - _

 

When he meets Gabriel Jones, Jacques tells him, “I love the jazz. Josephine Baker.”

Gabriel smiles at him. He says, “I like jazz, too,” in French. His accent is good for an American. They shake hands. He looks mildly disappointed to learn that Jacques has only been to Paris twice in his life. 

“We’re just going to have to change that,” he says, still in Jacques’ own language, though the twang and upward lilt is pure American bravado.

Jacques regards him for a moment and then smiles. They get down to the business for which Gabriel and his team has approached Jacques: to plant mines for anyone who would like to come after them. In the mornings the pair of them sit and talk jazz and Paris while the caravan of rescued soldiers move out, and then they follow at an easy pace. Jacques explains how deep to bury the mines, and Gabe brings out scraps of camouflaged tarpaulin to cover the places they don’t have time to bury deeply enough. He’s an artist, he tells Jacques. He pronounces camouflage the French way, probably in deference to the company.

He asks a lot of questions about the explosive devices Jacques has improvised. He thinks of a way to link one to a tripwire, and they do so among some trees. In Jacques’ opinion it is very nice work, far superior to the factory, and pleasant to be able to speak in his own language. Kreischberg had not been friendly to Resistance fighters, and there had been few Frenchmen to survive the first few weeks there.

On the third day of their march, Jacques seeks Gabriel out when they’re roused at dawn, and they share a canteen of heated water and half of a dense, bitter bar of chocolate that is the end of Gabriel’s field rations. They are nearly out of material that can be made into improved mines; mostly they walk along in companionable silence, waiting until some irresistibly smooth path or well-placed tree catches Jacques’ eye. So it’s quiet, when Jacques hears a faint rattle of noise.

Jacques’ hand on his chest stops Gabriel dead. “Did you hear that?” he says, and Gabriel listens intently. He looks at Jacques and shrugs: nothing. 

Jacques frowns up at the sky, turning his ear up to listen himself. The dull low sound of hail falling on trees. The crunch of leaves far off: a deer, maybe. And then - 

“Merde,” Gabriel says, and fumbles the radio handset off the pack on Jacques’ shoulders. “Hey, everything alright up there? We’re hearing shots.” 

Dim through the static, faint in the distance, comes the rapid fire of a machine gun.

“Radio, come in,” Gabriel says, urgently. “Come in, radio.”

Jim ducks as the tree over his head explodes into sharp, green-smelling fragments. He can hear Rogers’ man over the radio, stuck barely out of reach inside the half track he’s crouching behind. He looks up and sees men running hard through the woods, trying to escape the ambush. There’s not many of them that can run too fast after weeks or months of hard labor and the thin gruel Hydra called their food. About half of them fall down in their tracks, victim to the machine gun or slow starvation. The air is full of smoke and scattered gunshot as whoever can fire back does so. But there’s not many of those.

Jim hefts the gun in his hands, some Hydra pistol that shoots blue light instead of bullets. His hip and leg ache where he’d tumbled half onto the ground and half on top of Carter, who had yanked them both out of the cab when the Germans had started firing. She’s pressed against him shoulder to elbow, eyeing the radio. When a bullet cracks the glass and pings off the side mirror right above their heads, she doesn’t even flinch. “I’ll cover you,” Jim says to her, and hopes like hell that he knows how to shoot this thing.

The funny thing about German machine guns is how much faster they are than the American versions.  _ Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta _ . The sound had split the soft quiet of the forest, rattling like thunder through the trees. They’d turned and looked, both of them: Bucky with the rifle up against his shoulder, Steve with his empty, cold hands. “Lead platoon,” Bucky says, even though Steve can hear just fine from his good ear when there aren’t other noisy things competing for his attention.

Silence, and then again:  _ ra-ta-ta-ta-ta _ . Then the sci-fi noise of the Hydra guns, returning fire. They’d put the wounded up front, spread whatever weapons they had scrounged from the factory among each platoon. Whatever the front platoon had, it wasn’t enough.  _ Ra-ta-ta-ta _ , out-gunned. 

Steve drops to his knees, fumbles the radio off his back. “Carter, report,” he says into it, and feels relief wash through him like a wave when it crackles and spits and a moment later admits Peggy’s voice. 

“We’re pinned,” she says, as dry and unhurried as if he were teasing her out on the rifle range; only the thinnest edge of tension runs through her voice, like a single strand of hair out of place. A pistol cracks very close to her radio, and Steve winces as the sound of it bounces around his ear. “Could use some assistance.”

“The tank,” Bucky says. The ground is wet and cold under Steve’s knees, and Bucky towers over him, his face shadowed. “Send the tank up from the next platoon.”

Steve shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut. The sound of a tank firing would bring every Nazi in the area down on their heads, if their attackers hadn’t radioed back already. They’d had - they always had  _ weeks _ to prepare for their operations, everything choreographed to the littlest detail, known: terrain maps, radio codes, thin silver reels of recorded sounds - 

The edge of the radio transmitter digs into his forehead, sharp under the comforting weight of his helmet. “Shut up,” he hisses, and the map unfurls in his mind: the little stream they passed about fifteen minutes ago, which was probably where Peggy and her platoon had been ambushed. The twist in the path behind it, where the trees grew thick and twisted and impossible to see around.

“We need to send a platoon up from the rear,” Steve says, and Bucky rears back. 

“You nuts?” he says. “None of them have weapons. They’d all get killed.”

“I know,” Steve says, and hefts the radio in his hand. No overlap of competing automatic fire from the Nazis. (No automatic weapons on their side at all.) Non-combat patrol, then. Running supplies from one Nazi pillbox to another, maybe. Ten, fifteen shots at a time. Just one submachine gun. The others firing rifles, or sitting back and letting the M40 do all the work.

He looks up at Bucky. “How much time to do you need to run half a mile?”

Bucky’s head jerks to one side. Not questioning, exactly. Waiting for the rest. His breath blows white plumes into the air. Steve picks up the radio again, says into it low and urgent, “Pops, come in.” Hoping like hell Dugan was in range of the walkie talkie’s frequency. Dull shame in his chest that he never learned Morse for the radio, they all could have learned and not been relying on the company’s radioman for this. “Pops, do you copy?”

“I read you, Barber,” says the radio, cautious and quiet. Dum Dum transmits like the Nazis can’t hear him if he whispers.

The truck grumbles as the Limey steers it over to a break in the path, and kills the engine. In the silence, broken only by the ticking of the engine, they can hear machine gun fire. 

Over the radio, Rogers says, “Lead platoon’s taking fire. We need a surprise. Give ‘em a wide berth and come up from south, south-west. Make as much noise as you can on approach - on the radio too, in case they’re listening.”

On the other side of the cab, the Limey’s eyes are hard. Two days stuck in a truck with the guy and all Dugan knows about him is he likes to throw himself out of perfectly good airplanes. “We don’t have any automatic weapons,” he says, not looking too bothered by it. Dugan glances down at the Trench gun at his side, trying to guess what Rogers is playing at. The pistol he’d grudgingly loaned to the Limey is tucked into the other man’s belt.

“Some kinda fake-out,” Dugan says. 

The Limey’s only reaction is to blink; he’s a cold fish. “That is what you do, isn’t it?” he asks. “Deceptive operations?”

Dugan ruffles his own mustache with two fingers. What Dugan does is build the things he’s told to build, and carry the things he’s told to carry, and, up until two days ago, luxuriate in the knowledge that the artists’ outfit was too valuable to get sent places they could get shot at. Weren’t there real soldiers in that platoon, the one getting shot at?

“Pops,” Rogers says again, through the radio, and Dugan grits his teeth. When Rogers says jump, he can’t help himself: he asks how high.

“Wilco,” he says, his voice crackling. “Over and out.”

Steve looks up, meets Bucky’s eyes. “You’re a good shot with that,” he says, nodding his chin towards the rifle. “The best in your company, you said.”

“My letters were real,” Bucky says, “every goddamn word.”

Steve flushes, hot as if he’d been scalded: the shame of Fort Wayne, and the letters Bucky had sent before the Army censors could get ahold of them, full of words that burned the pages they were written on. He ignores it and says, doggedly, “There was a big pile of stones right near that river we passed, you remember it?  About two hundred yards north of the river.”

Bucky’s jaw tightens, and he nods in understanding. “If that’s not where the Germans are,” Steve says, “take cover there.”

Bucky’s hand snakes out, and grabs Steve’s shoulder roughly. “Be careful,” he says, and gives Steve a shake - hard enough that Steve staggers a little under the force of it. Then he turns, adjusts his grip on the butt of the rifle, and takes off running.

The forest swallows up the sound of his footsteps.

Steve clenches his hand around the transmitter, staring sightlessly in the mist towards where Bucky no longer is. The hail is giving way to rain, wetting down the back of Steve’s coat, trickling into his shoes, but still pinging  _ plunk plunk _ off his helmet. 

He reaches up with his free hand to steady it and then leaves his hand there against the cold metal, the curve of it just the same shape as his palm.

He presses the receiver but doesn’t say anything, doesn’t transmit. His breath rasps in his lungs, cut tight by the muscles in his throat.

It’s the cold that does it for him, that makes it so hard to breathe.

_ Ra-ta-ttt - _

The air blows out of Steve’s lungs like he’s been hit, and for a moment he feels like he has been: his muscles burn, his head swims, his ribs ache. The  _ crack  _ of rifle shot: once, twice, silence. Twice more:  _ crack, crack,  _ the sound lingering in the air like lighting.

Then silence, and the whining, whistling sound of Steve’s own breathing.

“Barber,” says the radio, in Falsworth’s crisp tones. “Worked like a charm; they thought we were another platoon. The Germans turned towards us, and Barnes got ‘em from behind. We’re all clear.”

“Jesus, Mary and all the saints,” Steve whispers, and lets his head fall into his chest. He hits the button for the radio. “Okay,” he says, and holds the transmitter away from his face so they can’t hear him wheezing. “Pass the word down the line and get everyone bunched up in one group. We’ve got about eight miles to go, let’s get back to Italy as quick as we can.”

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

As it turns out, they stay in Italy hardly longer than a shave and a haircut before Bucky is shepherded onto a C-47 airplane. Already on board, strapped up and ready to go, are Steve and Mabel and their funny group, which doesn’t surprise Buck too much - but he was surprised all right when Jim, Monty and Dernier clamber on behind him.

“What’re you doing here?” Bucky asks Jim, and then asks Steve, “What are they doing here?”

He hadn’t seen any of them since they’d crossed the Allied line, and it surprises him how glad he is to see them now; they all hands and embraces before the crew herds everyone into their seats, and Dernier thumps Bucky on the back so hard it actually takes his breath away. At camp they’d scattered, trying to find their own: Monty and Dernier to their countrymen, and Jim, well -

Jim had come over with the 100th Battalion and washed up on Italy, same as Bucky. They hadn’t met before they’d been thrown into the same cage, although Bucky’d been aware that the 107th had a company from the One Puka Puka assigned to them as scouts. Jim shakes his head when Bucky asks him, yelling the question over the roar of the engine.

“Eight made it to the prison camp,” Jim yells back, but then he shakes his head again, slumped back against the thin, chilly wall of the plane.

“Shit,” Bucky says, when Jim doesn’t say anything else. A hollow word to say about something like that. Just as well it’s drowned out by the noise of the plane.

“Two hundred twelve of us,” Jim says, and it isn’t too noisy for Bucky to hear the bitterness in his voice. His shoulder was warm, where they were brushing up against each other. “Almost used to it, at this point. ‘Go for broke’.” He leans over and spits on the ground.

Bucky looks at it: Jim’s spit gleaming on the dull metal. “I’d kill a man for a cigarette,” he says, and leans back himself, staring up at the little strip of lights over their heads. His foot twitches, and the twitch winds its way up his knee, and then makes him press his elbow into his own ribs.

“Which man,” Morita says, not looking over. “This man?”

Meaning Dugan, snoring and oblivious on the bench facing them. “He seems alright,” Bucky says, and tries to relax. “Maybe when we’re - say, they tell _you_ where we’re going?”

“Your wife didn’t tell you?” Morita says, but when Bucky looks over there’s nothing on his face to take offense to. Bucky looks for Steve, finds him cozied up with Agent Carter up near the pilot, like he’s been for most of the flight.

“Said we’d have the full story when we landed,” Bucky says. “You ever hear of the Army telling anyone _the full story_?”

“Maybe they’re sending us home,” Jim says.

Steve, feeling Bucky’s eyes on him, looks up at that moment. Under the lights his hair is the white blond of an angel’s, and his eyes are shadowed and dark. He smiles, and Bucky looks away.

“They’re not sending us home,” he says, and later on they find out he’s right.

 

-

 

London is cold and damp, and beautiful - what little glimpses he can steal of stone towers rushing by them as they bump and rattle over cobblestone streets, tucked away in a covered car. Bucky’s never been before; the last time he’d heard anything about the place it’d been back when the Germans had bombed the hell out of it in 1940.

“She’s looking better these days,” Monty says, getting his own little peeps through the curtain. His voice is thick with emotion, and Bucky thinks at least she didn’t look much worse than the parts of New York Bucky’s mother had forbade him to go back when they were kids. The streets are full of soldiers but they stay with the canvas buttoned up, like no one’s supposed to know they’re there. Then tucked away underground in a dense warren of offices, every door stamped with an eagle, every man and woman rushing importantly around.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Steve tells Bucky right as they arrive, and two MPs come to take him and his funny bunch away. Both of his hands shift a little at his sides, like he wants to take Bucky’s in them.

“An hour,” Bucky repeats, and in the crowded corridor Steve steps in close and does squeeze his hand, just for a second, before vanishing after a swirl of skirts and brown hair.

Two hours later, Monty finds Bucky’s hiding spot. They sit together smoking cigarettes, watching the haze vanish up through the little grate above their heads. They’re near enough to the surface that some light trickles down, and they can hear cars passing overhead. Somewhere, someone was hawking newspapers. “Trafalgar Square,” Monty says, and Bucky says, “Sounds dirty,” and Monty gives him another cigarette.

Two hours after that Jim and Dernier come on them and decide to squeeze in too, pockets full of chocolate and hard cheese and little sausages. Eating real food gives all of them the squats for most of the night, but for that little while it feels okay, like he’s just waiting for Steve to come back from the corner store, and then it’ll feel like home.

It’s not until the next day that Carter comes for them, while they’re finishing up breakfast: porridge from the SSR’s mess, which has a lot in common with wallpaper paste but at least is sitting easy in Bucky’s stomach.

“So they liked Steve’s idea,” Bucky says, as Carter approaches. They’d heard her from down the hall, the clicking of her heels.

“Now that it’s feasible, yes,” she says. Away from the front she looks like a picture: hair done up in the kind of rolls Bucky’s sisters used to spend hours trying to achieve at home, nails and lips a matching lacquered red, uniform pressed within an inch of its life. “Wouldn’t you like to hear all about it?”

Bucky’s already standing, and Monty does as well. “All of you,” she says, when Morita and Dernier only turn back to their bowls of porridge. “Yes, you as well.”

They raise eyebrows at each other, but follow her quietly through the rabbit warren. Carter leads without looking back: spine like a ruler, shoulders squared, hands swinging at her sides, almost in fists. Jim gives Bucky a little nod as they walk, eyebrows raised towards Carter’s backside. Bucky mimes grabbing his own balls and then twisting them tight in a fist, grimacing cartoonishly. Following behind, Dernier starts laughing.

“ _Une casse-couilles,_ ” he says, which is enough to earn him an elbow from Monty and what sounds like a hell of a hissing argument behind them. Carter sends a look over her shoulder, lips pressed together into a sly red line.

“ _Merde alors,_ ” she says to them, “ _t'en auras besoin ici._ ”

“Miss Carter,” Monty says, mortified, but they’ve come to a halt - they’ve arrived.

“It’s Agent Carter, thank you,” Carter says, and opens the door. “Come on, don't be shy.”

On the other side is a large, cluttered room: stacked high with files, stuffed with desks. The center of it is taken up by a war table easily as large as Bucky’s bedroom back home, covered edge to edge with a map dotted with Nazi flags and Hydra squids. Carter doesn't pause, squeezing them between the stacks past a blonde reading a newspaper, and through another unmarked door.

On the other side of the door is a big desk, mostly empty. The walls are mostly empty too. Behind the desk is a weathered man with little silver eagles on his shoulders. Steve is sitting on his right, and he makes a face at Bucky when they come in, carefully out of the colonel’s line of sight. Carter gracefully takes the seat to the colonel’s left. Mabel and Steve’s circus strongman - Dugan - are nowhere to be seen.

There are four seats on their side of the desk, and the colonel gestures towards them. “Sit down, boys,” he says, with a broad smile. Bucky feels his guts clench up at the sight of it, reflexively.

“How doth the little crocodile,” Monty murmurs, into Bucky’s ear.

The colonel grins at them, his hands folded on top of his desk. The lamp on the corner picks out the fine white hairs on his knuckles. It dims the white of his teeth, turning them the color of old paper. “My name is Colonel Phillips,” he tells them. “You are currently the guests of the Strategic Scientific Reserve. How long you continue to be so depends on the outcome of this meeting.”

Jim folds his arms over his chest, but no one else moves a muscle. The smile returns, just a fraction of it, ticking up the leather corner of the Phillips’ mouth. Bucky looks at Steve, who’s already looking at him. Steve is leaning forward in his seat, his expression smooth and a little intent. He wants Bucky to listen. To give whatever this is a chance.

“The SSR has a proposition for you,” Phillips says. The room is sealed shut; even the din of typewriters and female voices has been shut away by the still office air. “But I can’t tell you what it is. Do you know why not?”

He jabs a thumb at Steve, and a more gentle wave towards Carter. “You heard a little bit about what they do. So take a guess. Go on. Tell me what my proposition is.”

“It’s secret,” Monty says.

“Top secret,” Phillips assures them. “What else?”

“More camouflage,” Dernier says. “More trickery.”

“Well, you said they were smart,” Phillips says to Steve and Carter, jovial sounding.

“Quite smart,” Carter says, each word measured. She looks at Bucky when she says it, like he should be grateful for her recommendations. “Each one of them was invaluable in making the crossing through Austria.”

“I’ve read the report,” Phillips says flatly, his expression unchanged.

“They told us about the razzle dazzle,” Jim says, flat. “So this is something else. And once you tell us about it, that’s it. End of story. We can’t say no thanks.”

“You can’t say no to much: you’re in the Army,” Phillips says, but he tucks the smile away, flexes his fingers on the table like the prelude to a good long knuckle cracking. “Our tactical deception units already operate under very high levels of secrecy. I’d say most of the commanding officers who have benefited from our tactics did not know what we were doing on his battlefield. Each and every man who serves in these units is considered one hundred percent an acceptable loss, as long as the technology remains out of Nazi hands.”

Steve’s mouth twitches, and he looks down at his hands.

Bucky breathes slow. He tries to keep his attention on Phillips, who continues, “This unit will operate in a similar manner - but have the honor of reporting directly to the head honchos of the European Theater of Operations, at a level of classification I did not previously know existed. Should you accept this reassignment you will be erased from the history books. Your contributions to the war effort will never officially be recognized by the US government or any other. You will _cease to be_.”

He leans back into his seat and threads his fingers together. He shakes them, for emphasis. “As far as the official record is concerned, you would serve the remainder of your conscription doing unimportant things. Unofficially, you’ll be serving your country - your respective countries - on the most important battlefield of all.”

“If we say no,” Jim says, and Phillips shrugs.

“You walk out of here,” he says. “Back to your assigned units, if there’s anything left of them. If not, well - infantry always needs more warm bodies that know how to shoot a gun. But that’d be a damn shame.”

He reaches over, slides a stack of folders out in front of himself. His fingers beat a tattoo on their cover. “James Montgomery Falsworth,” Phillips says, without opening them. “Twelve months combat service with Her Majesty’s 3rd Parachute Brigade. Twenty-two jumps.”

“Twenty-three,” Monty begs politely.

Philips gives him a glacial, unimpressed stare and turns his gaze down the line. “Jacques Dernier. I don’t have a file on you,” Phillips says. “Not an official one, anyway. But the Germans do, don’t they? Three escapes from prison camps, and our network tells me you have quite a record of successful sabotage. The water treatment plant, north of Marseilles?”

“Mm,” Dernier says, neither a confirmation or a denial. Philips’ crocodile smile returns, and he looks at Jim.

“James Morita. Your company was present at Volturno River and the capture of Benevento, against,” and here Phillips pauses, his tone becoming almost delicate, “heavy enemy resistance. You yourself were wounded at Benevento, but still saved the lives of five other men.”

He stares at Jim, who nods back at him, reluctant. “I’m given to understand you’re also a trained medic and radio operator,” Philips adds. “Two for the price of one.

“And as for you…” Phillips squints at Bucky.

"This is about the doctor,” Bucky says, suddenly. Everyone looks at him. Across the table, Carter smiles. “Zola. The one from the camp.”

The colonel smiles too. “Now why do you say that?” he asks, and shoots a proud look over his shoulder at Steve.

“He’s experimenting with a serum,” Bucky says. "He shot me full of it, you wanna know what it did.” He falters, everything else that Zola did to him crowding his mouth. It’s all Bucky can do to keep it in, keep all that from spilling out onto the colonel’s desk.

“I don’t know why else I’m here,” he says instead, lamely. He doesn’t look at Steve when he says it, doesn’t look at Carter. But the colonel does - first one, then the other, then back at Bucky and the men on his side of the table. There’s no hint of a smile on his face anymore.

“Right now,” Philips says, evenly, “I’ve got a bunch of artists and fairies on my hands, who do a very good job of faking the movement and activity of an army - thus protecting the lives of tens of thousands of real soldiers. Up til this point they’ve done that very good job away from active combat, and as far from the front line as I can realistically keep them. This operation will not function this way. It will be required to complete missions independently, in enemy territory, as a tightly disciplined unit, under circumstances where both failure _and_ survival are not an option. I cannot send my artists out all alone in the wilderness. They’re sensitive, and I like them too much.”

He sighs, and turns a weary smile onto Bucky. “Luckily,” he says, “we had a hell of a practice run, getting the lot of you back from Austria. Which leads me to believe that with the right mix of soldiers and artists, this crazy idea of Rogers’ actually has a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding.”

His gaze sharpens. “If you’re asking me whether you earned a spot on this unit because of Rogers,” Phillips says, and jabs a finger down on the chipped surface of his desk, “then you’re absolutely right. I gave explicit orders not to hare off after you, and three hours later I come to discover that Captain Rogers has gone AWOL and taken three of my best agents and some very expensive equipment with him. I need someone who will control that sort of impulse out in the field, and I expect that to be you.”

Bucky blinks at him. He licks his lips. “Yessir,” he manages.

Phillips raises an eyebrow. “Yessir,” he echoes, half a question.

Dernier unleashes a torrent of French. Carter answers without a pause, and they go back and forth like that for a while, mostly sounding like any other nice conversation until Monty jumps in with an “Excuse-moi, mais -” and then it starts sounding more like a fight.

Bucky feels a brush against his shoulder as Jim leans over and says into his ear, “Whaddayou think?”

 

 

 

“I think you’re a damn good medic,” Bucky says, out of the side of his mouth. He watches Steve watch their conversation, rather than look over and see what Jim thinks about it. “I think we’d be lucky to have you. And I think you’d get a better shot at seeing the end of the war than if you go back to the Purple Heart Brigade.”

He feels Jim shift away. Bucky looks over and sees him frowning deeply, which he guesses he earned. But then Jim ducks his head - reaches up under his cap to scratch at his hair. “I got a girl,” he says after a moment, awkward. “And my brother, he’s just a kid -”

“Yeah,” Bucky says, because he knows how it is.

Carter laughs, and both of them flinch. Monty’s laughing too, Dernier casting his eyes heavenward, but all that happens is more French. “Okay,” Jim says, and then louder, “Okay, I’m in too.”

They all look at him, and then Monty says, “Oh oui, moi aussi - sorry, we’re in as well, didn’t we say?”

The muscle in Steve’s jaw jumps. He’s staring right at Bucky, waiting for judgement. Taut and silent, like he really thinks there’s some other choice Bucky can make. Bucky sighs. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

“Good,” Phillips says, back to joviality, “because we’ve got a starring role for you, Sergeant.”

 

-

 

Bucky exhales. “I don’t know if I can do this,” he says.

“Could be worse,” Steve says, squinting down the stretch of green. “You could be that poor asshole they got wearing the costume.”

“I _am_ the asshole they got wearing the costume,” Bucky says, and bounces a little on his toes. He feels Steve glance up at him, the shift in Steve’s expression, even as his eyes stay trained ahead. “I could be kissing babies in Wichita. Getting kissed by USO dames. Signing comic books.”

“You don’t even know where Wichita is,” Steve says.

A hundred and twenty yards away, a hand is raised. They’re ready, waiting. Bucky tugs the shield off his arm, hands it to Steve. “It’s in Oklahoma,” he says. “Now get outta my shot, you ain’t the movie star today.”

Steve knocks a fist into Bucky’s shoulder. Through the thick padding of the suit he barely feels it. He shoves back anyway and Steve nearly goes sprawling, the heavy shield wobbling in his hand. He joins the rest of - their unit, Bucky supposes, or what will be, whenever they’re finally deemed mission ready.

Warwickshire is quiet, and far away from the front, and so green it makes Bucky’s eyes hurt. They sleep _indoors_ , a thing so miraculous that he hadn’t cared at all when the Army’d billeted the whole lot of them in an old gasworks building rather than let Gabe and Jim sleep in the same building as the white soldiers. Weeks and weeks sleeping on a dry floor, with an actual roof over their heads, and no one had said a word when Steve had unrolled his blanket and put it next to Bucky’s, almost close enough to touch.

They’re learning deception, the _razzle dazzle_ \- how to create shadows that look just realistic enough. The first week they cover an old storehouse at the edge of the vast property, simulating the destruction wrought by one of the Germans’ V-1 missiles. Steve runs this part of the show because he knows how it looks by night even if he’s observing by day. They do such a good job it even appears derelict from the ground. A yawning hole appears to gape in one wall of the engine room and the main building is soot-covered and the roof blacked out with painted tarp that shows rusty broken machinery and patches of bare ground.

They learn how to cover tanks, and how to fake them with rubber dummies - which are not really rubber, but they call them that. In fact they’re neoprene. The trick is to make the mistakes they wouldn’t want to make in the field, draping tanks with netting unevenly, so the clear hard edges show through.

The pneumatic tanks and even airplanes aren’t too heavy, no more than a hundred pounds each, but setting them up still amounts to fairly backbreaking work - and they have to do it again, and again, and again, often moving them once they’re fully inflated. For a while Bucky joked around hoisting the things, like he was lifting a real tank. This was before they’d given him the costume, when Captain America had still just been a funny drawing on Steve’s paper pad.

Dugan stepped in to show him how to make it look more like he was putting in an effort. “You stick your jaw out and get the muscles in your neck to tighten up,” he said, demonstrating around his soggy, ever-present cigar.

Monty gave acting tips, too. He scoffed at Dugan’s overt hamminess and said, “Here now. In reality, there’s very little need for all of that.”

“Hey,” Dugan said.

“What I mean is that if you can really believe yourself to be this Captain America there’s no call for the posturing. We made do with worse props than this. And I’ll tell you, this shadow business…” He trailed off.

“The Shadow!” Bucky declaimed, into the brief silence. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!” It was a radio play they used to listen to at home. He remembered it clearly, the surreal juxtaposition of the omnipresent Shadow and his power to ‘cloud men’s minds’... while all the while he and Steve looked out over the dusk dark-gold-and-pink streets of New York and watched the colors bleed into gray.

Steve, who’d been supervising their work from atop a tractor, waved at them to go left. Bucky sighed and wove sideways, and Monty reached up to unhook some netting for him.

“What, now?” Monty said, out of breath.

Dugan grunted. “That’s American entertainment, _fellow-me-lad_.” His imitation of Monty’s accent wasn’t half bad. Monty acknowledged him with a wry tilt of the head. “Say,” Dugan went on, gesturing to Bucky once he’d set down the tank that has burdened him. He patted its muzzle, making sure the bicycle pump had done its job. It stood up firm. “That shouldda been your secret identity.”

“What, wealthy young man about town? I wish.”

“You know.”

“The Shadow, right. Sell bonds to the shadowy figure in the corner. Give the whole game away.”

“No subtlety,” Monty said. “What I was - what I was trying to say is that - the whole idea is not to fake too much, isn’t it now? This old Greek philosopher, you see, Plato, he wrote that all the world is really shadows. We’re all hanging in a cave watching puppet shows, and we think it’s real. So in that respect…”

“Huh,” Dugan said, uninterested. He grabbed the bicycle pump and went to work shoring up a neoprene half-track that had begun to sag.

Steve hopped down off his tractor and sidled over to them, shaking life into hands that had gone numb around the little viewing glass he used to get a clear sight on them. His hands were always mottled in the cold, fingers pink white red and splotchy. Bucky had to fight the impulse to grab them in his own and instead watched Steve stick them in his pockets and hunch his shoulders, nodding in satisfaction at their display, then squinting into the distance, planning what else there was to do.

“Seems right,” Bucky said idly, watching Monty, watching Steve, who always saw everything in light and shadow anyhow.

“Speaking of radio plays,” Dugan said.

Bucky nodded. “Yeah,” he said to Steve, who picked up the walkie-talkie to check in on Morita and Gabe.

Sound, too, propagates better at night. It’s the inversion layer in the air, the hanging clinging dampness. Jim explained it to him once, but he isn’t sure he understood. What lingers in his mind is the impression of ghostliness, the fog that whispers through their early mornings, that holds sound and sight and thought. Sound travels easily in this spectral gloaming, where real and unreal ravel and unfurl.

It makes Bucky uneasy. The same conditions best suited for deception are rotten for a sniper.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

They spend mornings codebreaking, studying Nazi radio transmissions, memorizing lists of names and ranks and nationalities for all the armies massed on the European continent. That’s Carter’s show, and her business.

“My superior told me in training,” Carter said to them one day, bracing her arms on the table with palms splayed flat. The pattern of scarlet nails on metal table was startling, like paint on a tank. “That two traits will destroy an espionage operation. One is wishfulness; the other is yesmanship.”

“We don’t suffer from that here,” Monty told her, parrying the hot poker of her interrogation with a cool Oxford drawl.

Morita said, “Wishful we ain’t.”

“What I mean to say,” Carter went on, straightening and coming around the table, “Is that you should at no point fear to question our plan or suggest one of your own. You are now part of this operation, wholly and completely.” She turned to Dernier and repeated something in French, then added, “C’est entendu?”

“Entendu.”

“These same traits will be the downfall of the Germans,” Carter added. “After all, we’ve baited our line with, well.” Her gesture encompassed Bucky, blissfully free of the costume for the afternoon.

“A superhero, yeah, but they believed in that anyhow,” Gabe pointed out. “Ubermenschen, and all that.”

“Not only that, but they are desperate to please the Fuhrer and Schmidt, who between them have exceedingly odd ideas about the occult. You ought to meet some of the rest of our subcommittee on occult matters. The SSR has at times, I believe, engaged the services of a trained magician, a Princeton-educated investigator of paranormal phenomena, and an Egyptologist. And now you gentleman as well: artists, carneys - ”

“Hey,” Dugan put in, then shut up.

“ - radio hams, engineers, and performers. And soldiers, all of you soldiers, too.”

“The cyanide makes that pretty clear.” They’ve all got a pill sewn into a jacket seam. Dernier’s is inlaid into the bottom of a wristwatch.

 

-

 

They’re learning, also, the business of war. The strategy of it. The hungry rush of invention, the better mousetraps being built. The costume is the best mousetrap of all, baited and ready.

They had to go to London to retrieve it: a bumpy, two hour ride for Bucky, Steve, Dernier - who came along because there were some questions about the kind of explosives they want - and Carter. The countryside was full of sheep, bomb craters, and wide open pastures - profoundly boring to everyone except Bucky, who was the only one still gazing avidly out the windows when they passed an American encampment on the outskirts of the city.

There, on the stone, next to a sign pointing the way, someone had painted a red and blue circle, with a white star in the middle. He thought of jostling Steve awake, making sure he saw it too, and didn’t - just watched it pass by, craning his neck until it was all the way out of sight. When he looked back, Carter was looking at him, her red lips poised in something like a smile.

“Captain America,” she said lightly, “is becoming quite the topic of gossip. We’ve been issuing the usual opaque briefings to MI5 and MI6. Some are skeptical, but two of the double agents the British government employs have already taken anxious prompting from the Germans. They’re quite curious about the ‘American superman.’ ”

A bump in the road tipped Steve over into Bucky, who nudged him carefully back upright. “I didn’t know it had all started,” he said. “I mean, we haven’t even …” He trailed off uncertainly, overwhelmed by the scope of it all, by how much they _hadn’t_ yet.

“This sort of thing takes time and planning,” Carter answered. “Quite a lot of planning, really. We don’t need to wait for your unit to be combat ready before we start muddying the waters. I’ve been in contact with Howard since the moment Colonel Phillips gave the greenlight for this operation. Before you’d signed up, actually.”

More sheep, more farms whizzed past them. Bucky felt like he’d stepped into a Beatrix Potter book. Last week Steve had sent a letter to Bucky’s sisters with its pages ringed in little drawings of rabbits, hopping around in made up Indiana fields. “Who’s Howard?” he asked.

“ _Who_ is a terrible question to ask a spy,” she said severely, but she smiled a little more when she said it so Bucky thought she was joking. “ _Howard_ is Howard Stark. Oh, don’t make that face. Or at least please don’t let him see you make that face, he’ll be unbearable.”

“Howard Stark,” Bucky said, and covered his grin with his hands.

“The one and only,” she said, dry as a bone. “I had originally contacted him to help animate Dr Erskine’s phantom. The SSR is in possession of all of Erskine’s work, as far as we’re aware. Working from his notes, Howard has been helping to produce plausible scientific results, and all the paperwork that could possibly fall into the wrong hands. He’s got quite the flair for the dramatic; he’s been writing annoyed memos to our agents complaining about Erskine’s restrictions, and begging for the chance to run further tests on our super soldier.”

Steve’s shoulders twitched. When Bucky looked down he was smiling, chin still tucked into his chest, eyes closed. Shamming sleep, the little weasel.

“Tar Roberts of MI5 has already submitted his own request,” Carter continued, “that the subject be deployed in combat to test capabilities. It all fits quite nicely with our own strategies, actually. Agent Z - one of our double agents - managed to prove themselves to their Nazi handlers by turning over a report that the British have been ‘unable to replicate the experiment,’ and are ‘seeking information on procedures performed by Zola’.”

Bucky’s chest tightened. “Shadow business,” he muttered. “You’re mixing the fake and the real.”

“Of course,” Peggy said. “The best deceptions are both.”

“What happens when we need it to be real?” Bucky demanded, and turned fully to look at her. Dislodged, Steve opened his eyes, frowning muzzily up at the two of them. “What happens when it’s only us between real guns, real tanks - and real soldiers?”

“That’s why we’re lucky to have Howard,” Peggy answered. “He was quite intrigued by the challenge I posed to him. I don’t think he could’ve helped himself, anyway - once he knew what we were up to.”

They’d gone to the Stark Fair, him and Steve and some of their friends, a few days before Bucky had shipped out. It’d been fun even though Steve had been in a foul mood, even though the flying car he’d been excited to see had only caught fire and crashed down onto the stage, even though some toughs had caught Arnie by the bathroom and nearly roughed him up. In person Stark was shorter than he’d looked on stage, about the same height as Carter, with a punishing handshake and more pride in his work than Bucky’s mother would approve of.

But it was a piece of work, Bucky had to admit - the suit, the shield, all of it.

“Pneumatic tanks,” Stark said, patting the arm of the costume. Bucky used to listen to Stark’s interviews on the radio, and to hear him in person was disconcerting. He spoke faster, and he was less careful to polish off the edges of a faint accent, one that plucked at Bucky’s attention, reminding him of his cousins. “Trip the switch and they’ll shoot high pressure air from your gloves: voila, instant super strength. But don’t try and lift a tank with them, bucko. Limit yourself to a small car, a motorcycle, your average sized Nazi, things like that.”

“What’s the time limit?” Steve said.

“Fifteen seconds of lift,” Stark replied, “forty five seconds to prime. The body armor is my own design, of course. A proprietary weave, and carbide ceramic plates here, here and here. And here. The jacket will top you out at only fifteen and a half pounds, trousers are a further six. Best that the Soviets can do is a _bib_ that’s about seven pounds all by itself. We had a whale of a time testing; I had my team throw just about everything we could think of at it. Consider yourself safe and sound from HE shells at fifteen meters, not to mention submachine guns and pistols - unless it’s Miss Carter aiming at you.”

“Don’t push your luck,” Carter said.

“Try it on, Bucky,” Steve urged.

“It’s loud,” said Bucky, fingering the edge of one stiff blue sleeve.

“It’s perfect,” Steve said, with satisfaction; he’d drawn the design for it himself.

Carter gave them a tour of all of the devices they’ll have at their disposal while Bucky got dressed. For covert communication they’ve got invisible ink, the real stuff, not what Bucky and Steve used to send away for from the backs of comic books. “These are radios?” Dernier said, picking one up and examining it. It looked too small to be real.

Bucky listened with half an ear, shivering a little as he tugged his uniform off and hung it neatly on the back of a chair. If he had to be in his skivvies in front of Howard Stark at least he looked all right, healed up from everything Hydra had done to him. Not a scar left on him, which had surprised Bucky; he used to scar pretty easily as a kid.

“Can we see the shield?” Steve asked, which was another piece of Stark’s work. A special metal, mined from a country in Africa some of Bucky’s racier pulp novels were set in. The British had tried to colonize it a while back; it hadn’t gone too well for them.

“Be careful with that,” Stark called. “That’s the only one like it.”

“Why you sending it out to get shot at, then?” Steve said, hefting it up with both hands. It looked enormous with him holding it.

“A sacrifice for a worthy cause, if you listen to Eisenhower,” Howard muttered, leaning back against his work table and folding his arms. Steve snorted.

Bucky buttoned up the fly of the costume. The pants were plain blue, thank God, and almost sturdy enough to stand on their own. A few weeks out on the front and they probably would.

“I’ve been a part of this ghost army business since ‘42,” Stark said. He pulled a cigarette out of a gold case and lit it. He offered the case to Bucky, who took one and lit it with the Stark’s gold lighter. Even the smell of it was too rich for his blood, and made his head swim. “What a hack job that was, before I came on board. But Fairbanks and I go back ages. Met on the set of _The Thief of Baghdad_. I’d designed the flying horse, you know.”

“Wow,” Bucky said, around his cigarette. “Could it really fly?”’ The damn jacket was covered in buckles and padding, and felt heavier than the promised fifteen and a half pounds. He held it up, shook the folds out of it, finally found a zipper hidden along the side. Stark watched him do it, mouth twitching below his mustache. Steve used to save newspaper clippings for Bucky to read, about Stark and his inventions. He may still even have them, tucked in the box underneath their bed.

Stark skewered him with a contemptuous look. “The magic of cinema.”

Probably he was still touchy about that flying car. “Oh,” Bucky said.

“Not that those effects aren’t just as useful,” Stark said. “Which is the point of all - _this_. You certainly got your work cut out for you, Sergeant.”

“Good thing I’m bulletproof,” Bucky said, and blew cigarette smoke toward the ceiling.

“You’re welcome,” Stark said drily, flicking his eyes down over the suit, lingering pointedly on the star demarcated in the center of his chest. Bucky put the helmet on against his stare, and Stark raised an eyebrow again, looking at a spot just between Bucky’s eyebrows. Bucky’s eyes almost crossed trying to follow his gaze, and he shook his head. He knew what Stark was getting at. It was a conspicuous outfit for a soldier.

“Let’s have a look,” Stark said. He moved forward and put a hand on the seam where thin metal plates lined Bucky’s torso beneath the cloth. Bucky tried not to think how he looked. Steve glanced over, and Bucky let one side of his mouth crimp up, self-conscious.

“It’s wired for radio?” Steve asked, meaning the helmet. They’ll be directing him during missions, giving him prepared speeches and stage cues: tugging his strings this way and that.

“There’s a microphone as well,” Stark said. “In case he wants to talk back.”

“I’ll want to shoot in it,” Bucky said tentatively. He was testing out his peripheral vision, trying to keep both Steve and Stark in his field of view. “See how the movement is. Can’t always punch out the Nazis with pneumatic gloves and all.”

“Of course,” Howard said. “Though ideally it won’t see too much combat.”

“It won’t?”

“You never know,” Steve chipped in. He settled the shield he’d been holding down on Stark’s workspace. It let off a little humming sound as it settled in a wobbling circle, like a glass when you scraped a finger around the rim.

“Hopefully you’ll be a little less reckless with this technology, Captain,” Howard told him, squaring off to examine Bucky one last time. “Speaking of which, I thought you had to go and meet with your co-conspirators.”

Steve glanced at his watch, then back at Howard, then to Bucky, who shrugged.

“Later?” he told Bucky, who gave him a little wave, still moving stiffly inside the costume. After he’d gone, Howard turned back to Bucky with a shrug. “Keep the suit. Bring it back tomorrow at seventeen hundred or so, I’ll be around. It’s a little warm for extended wear, but you’ll be grateful for that when you’re out there this time of year.”

“I guess I’ll take it to the firing range tomorrow. They’ve got all the guys learning to shoot,” he said.

Howard made a soft sound, a refined kind of snort, and stuck his hands in his pockets. He rocked back on his heels, and the look he gave Bucky was sharp and commiserating. “Teaching the fairies to act like real soldiers, eh?”

Bucky’s fingers caught, halfway through unbuttoning the heavy jacket. He looked up at Stark. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “Thanks for the uniform.”

 

-

 

Another wave from the camera. Bucky crouches. Braces his fingertips against the damp earth. His breath blows steam into the air. He’s waiting for the crack of the starter pistol, but it’s not gonna come.

Bucky’s hips lift. His feet dig into the wet earth. The hand comes down like a flag and he’s off, legs pumping furiously. A cheer goes up from the motley crowd on the grass. He barely hears it.

He pulls up just short of the camera, the crew unflinching. “Good,” the director says, and they do it twice more, and then three times past them at the angle, the camera turning to follow him down the little pony track. He’s sweating inside the suit, but he waves off the canteen Jim holds up as he stumbles to a halt just past them.

“Buck ran track in school,” he hears Steve say, with satisfaction. “Won first in the region for the eight eighty yard dash.”

 

 

 

Bucky swipes gloved fingers around the holes in the helmet, digging sweat out from where it presses firm against his cheekbones. “You want me to go again?” he asks the camera crew.

He lifts a tank by its barrel, bends steel bars with his bare hands, throws around barbells that look like they’d have flattened Charles Atlas. The camera crew keeps its distance. When they watch the footage later it all looks pretty good, looks like the barbells and steel bars are real, the footage of him running sped up just enough that he blurs across the screen, faster than Jesse Owens. He leans over in his seat to whisper to Steve, “What’s his mile?”

“Two minutes, fifty four point three seconds,” Steve whispers back.

“Show off,” Bucky says, and at his other elbow Jim laughs, smothers it in his hand.

 

-

 

It’s a few weeks later that they get to see one of the other films, the ones for the public, the final piece of Steve’s plan.

There’s a weekly movie night at the rehabilitation center in Packington Park. They’ve been given leave twice since arriving at Warwickshire, but it’s wintertime and there’s not much to do besides ride along drizzly country lanes and maybe stop and sketch a few picturesque brooks or find a nice place to be alone for a while. Mostly they’ve kept to themselves - they’re under orders not to get friendly with the other deception units, much less the ordinary soldiers that come and go sometimes from Walton Hall. But it’s a special night - they’re due to ship out for Italy in two days, and this week the feature film is _Captain America: Defender of Democracy_.

It’s cold in the gasworks - nothing but bare stone walls, uneven concrete floors. They plugged up the broken windows with tarp filched from one of the sonic units, and managed to scrounge a little electric stove. Dernier had found a mattress somewhere, or stolen it from the white barracks, and at night he and Dugan have taken to sharing it for warmth. Bucky is unspeakably envious, because the cold air is terrible for Steve’s asthma and more than almost anything else he’s longed for the lumpy, creaky bed they have at home, and the four walls they could put between them and the rest of the world. But they haven’t dared, neither of them, and not Gabe either, who has even more to lose.

They all huddle near the electric stove as they get dressed. Bucky’s clothes are new, given to him by the British. Well, mostly new. It’s hard to get underwear in wartime. Monty’s informed them that the Brits require rations coupons for underwear, so they’re all wearing someone’s old cotton sets. Used underwear. At least it’s clean.

“It ain’t silk stockings,” Bucky comments to Steve, pulling his shorts off the rim of the stove. He shakes them a little so they won’t sear his dick when he puts them on, hopping from one foot to the other in the cold air.

“There’s an Army officer,” Monty pipes up. He’s crouched near the stove heating up a kettle for the hard, bitter tea that only he really likes, so he’s at just the right height to be face to face with Bucky’s hairy, pale ass as it disappears into his clothes. “Well, an intelligence agent. There’s a rather notorious picture of him in full ladies’ wear floating about. I hear he even had a brassiere. Was undercover, of course - or so he says - as a Times correspondent.”

Gabe keeps his head down, doesn’t say anything to that - not that Bucky expects him to. Mabel had to be careful enough in Manhattan.

“Thanks,” Steve says, as Monty hands him a mug. It’s steaming hot but Steve never got any of the sense God gave man, so of course he burns his tongue going to swallow one of his white tablets.

“Hope we don’t have to do that,” Dugan says, shaking his head. “Bad enough when Kathy got sick and I hadda be the bearded lady.”

“Now you’re pulling my leg,” Morita says. He’s tying up his tie and frowning down at it like it contains a secret. It doesn’t: that’s their shoelaces, which are knitted around thin, fine garotte wire.

Bucky eyes Dugan, because honestly he can’t be sure. Dugan strokes his mustache, his face as opaque and mysterious as a walrus’s.

Because this is how they talk about it: they don’t. After they came back from London, Bucky had still been stewing over Howard Stark. He burst when the guys had been joking around, watching some of the other camoufleur units being trained. They’d been made to dig foxholes, and then stay in them while a tank drove back and forth over their heads. Steve and Gabe had been somewhere else, so they hadn’t had to hear the way Dugan and Monty imitated the delicate laughter coming from the foxholes, the mincing way some of the men had shoveled dirt.

“None’a that,” Bucky snarled, and they looked at him in surprise. “I don’t wanna hear one word outta you guys about fairies and queers, you hear me?”

“Sure,” Morita said, after a beat where he and Dugan and Monty and Dernier had looked at each other. “Okay, Barnes.”

And that’d been it, mostly. He thinks they know about him and Steve. Dugan knows. Jim knows. But they don’t talk about it. It’s easier, probably, because they’ve got orders not to fraternize and none of them have ever been prone to giggling and mincing, not even Mabel May. Steve’s never cared much, but Bucky’s watched wistfully as the other queer soldiers become friends. He thinks that maybe Gabe is seeing someone on base, because there’ve been a few times now that Bucky’s woken up from a nightmare and seen Gabe’s bedroll empty.

He wishes - well, it doesn’t matter what he wishes. But it would’ve been nice, to be able to make friends with some of the other fellows - be able to let his hair down.

Steve, at least, has made friends with someone, because it’s him who supplies the whiskey for them to drink on the ride over to Packington Park, something that tastes like smoke and burns all the way down. They’re all seven of them crammed into one Jeep: Monty in the driver’s seat, Dugan and Mabel up front, the rest of them squished into the back. Steve’s in Bucky’s lap, mostly - tucked in snug enough that Bucky’s staving off a hard-on with fear of what Steve’s bony ass will do to him if Monty goes too hard over the uneven road. Steve for his part has spent most of the drive leaning forward, helping to pass the bottle from back to front, forearm braced along Mabel’s - Gabe, it’s Gabe now - shoulder.

He asked once when they’d become friends, and they smiled at each other like he’d told a joke.

They certainly seem cozy enough now - although back in New York they wouldn’t have been talking out the logistics of getting to the front - whether one truck will be sufficient for the equipment, how to segregate Dernier’s explosives from the rest of their cargo, whether five days was really enough time to scout and set up before the first phrase of the attack.

“They haven’t even crossed the river yet,” Gabe says, “The Fifth just barely broke through the Bernhardt Line. We go any earlier they’re gonna rope us into the X Corp assault.”

“If they can’t be ready, we need to be,” Steve says, and takes a big swig from the bottle. He wipes his mouth and continues, “Can’t fake super speed without knowing where the Germans are going to be and when. Besides, I wanna get a look at that monastery, it’s supposed to be a sight.”

He handed the bottle back to Bucky. It doesn’t taste any better the third time.

Steve peels away from him when they arrive at the rehab center, leaving Bucky with a warm spot on his chest he rubs absently, and an ache in his balls he tries to ignore. They park their jeep among a line of a dozen identical jeeps, and Steve ties a handkerchief around the mirror in the hope they’ll be able to find it after the movie.

They attract some attention walking in - Gabe, mostly, and then Jim, but it’s British club, not an American one, so it’s not segregated. The place is set up pretty nice: a piano in the corner, a little bar next to the screen, where Monty and Dugan are dispatched to fetch beer for everyone. Someone’s tickling the ivories around a Tommy Dorsey song, mostly drowned out by the group gathered around singing.

“What’re you so quiet for?” Steve asks, as Dugan hands him a pint, and then yells “What?”

“S’alotta noise,” Bucky says again, and then shouts “ _I’m alright_ ,” when Steve only looks at him, baffled, cocking his good ear at Bucky. He’s wishing, absurdly, for the costume - or at least the helmet, or maybe some cold water.

He feels too sober, despite the whiskey and the beer and the heat and noise. Everyone else is in the proper spirit - not just Steve and the rest of them, who are on their way to a real drunk - but the other soldiers too. Most of them seem to be from the other regiments stationed between here and Coventry - here for R&R, not because someone shot their leg off. He knows exactly which companies are here from their shoulder patches and the songs that have erupted now and again (they’d studied their own troops as well as everyone else’s) and - looking around, drinking their whiskey instead of his beer, dripping condensation onto the little cracked table - who’s seen action and who hasn't.

He untangles himself from Monty’s increasingly octopus-like embrace, and goes to find the toilet.

It’s hardly any quieter, and it stinks like the toilet at the Black Rabbit, a degenerate little place on Bleecker he used to go to sometimes with Steve and Arnie until the police had shut it down for good. The comparison isn't comforting.

He sloshes water over his face, sticks his wet fists in his hair and slicks it back - but it’s no good. The guy staring back at him in the mirror doesn’t look anything like that kid who used to have so much fun down in the Village. He doesn’t look like anyone Bucky recognizes at all.

The door opens, and Steve slips through the crack. He puts his back against the door, stares at Bucky in the mirror. The shoulders in his blouse don’t even fit right; they jut out like epaulettes. “What’s the matter with you, Buck?” he asks, and ain’t that the question of the hour. Bucky looks back at himself. He isn’t even wearing a tie. His hair’s sticking up in crazy spikes.

“You’re gonna get us all killed,” he says, and though he laughs on the end of it, it comes out mean.

Steve scoffs. His color’s high; he’s always been a lightweight. “Aw, come on,” he says. “No I ain’t.”

“This is, this is -” He straightens, turns to face Steve fully. “We ain’t got a chance in hell of pulling this off, you gotta know that.”

Steve looks at Bucky like _he’s_ the crazy one. “We pulled off all the other ones,” he says. “Even finding you. We haven’t lost a man yet.”

“ _Yet_ ,” Bucky says. “Gonna happen sooner or later. Guys get killed all the time, even the regular soldiers, not ones like - you’ve been right on the front line s, drawing fire _on purpose_ , and now even that’s not enough for you. You wanna go off and pretend to be a - pretend to be _Superman_. This is nuts, Steve.”

The epaulettes hitch up towards Steve’s ears. “This is who would take me,” he says. “This is who would let me do my part.”

Bucky’s fists curl at his sides. “This ain’t a comic book,” he says. “We’re not those guys, we’re - we’re just dumb kids from Brooklyn, Steve, this is way outta our league. It’s a whole other sport. It’s war.”

Steve looks away, and Bucky’s blood goes hot. The look on his face - the _disapproval_ \- he knows what Steve’s gonna say before he even opens his trap.

“You don’t gotta be a part of this,” Steve says, “you can go back to the -” and that’s as far as he gets before Bucky shoves him. He doesn’t really mean to bring his weight on Steve but when Steve fights he fights _dirty_ , like he’s trying to _climb_ Bucky to get the best angle for punching.

They scrabble for dominance - slapping at each other gracelessly like when they were kids, like no one’s ever taught them how to fight or hold a gun - and then Steve gets both hands free and uses them to grab Bucky’s ears and haul his head down, mash their mouths together. Fighting dirty.

He tastes like beer, and underneath that just of slick spit, bitter on Bucky’s own tongue. His blunt fingernails dig into Bucky’s scalp; his elbows are sharp points in Bucky’s hands. One skinny thigh worms its way between Bucky’s, and Buck’s spreading his legs a little to get down to the right angle even as he gets hotter, gets madder at the goddamn nerve Steve’s got, grinding his cock up against Bucky’s like that.

He drops Steve’s arms so he can get both hands on Steve’s waist, lift him up so their hips are locked up together, rubbing hard enough that it hurts a little. Steve hooks an ankle around the back of Bucky thigh - for balance probably, or maybe just to relieve the pressure. He’s laid off kissing and is just hanging on for dear life: their foreheads pressed together, Steve’s eyes shut tight, teeth drawn back over his lips. Pinned up against the door and writhing at the injustice of it.

Most of his weight is held by Bucky’s thighs and by Steve himself so Bucky’s got enough leverage to shake a hand free, pull roughly at the buckle on Steve’s belt until the leather comes free and Bucky can snake it off him entirely, Steve’s pants loose enough that Bucky doesn’t even have to undo them to pull them down his hips. They tangle between them, bunching up at Steve’s ankle and knee but leaving him bare enough that Bucky can get his own pants open and rub up against him.

He’s hard enough he doesn’t have to use a hand to keep himself in place, thrusting between Steve’s cheeks, the only place on him that’s padded enough to feel soft.

“That all you got, Barnes?” Steve pants, hand on his own cock.

He can feel Steve’s other foot wiggling around, straining for the ground. His forearms push Bucky’s shoulders down. Bucky shoves back, hard enough that Steve’s skull knocks against the door, hard enough that he comes a little dislodged and the head of his cock slips in and presses hard against Steve’s hole.

They freeze. Bucky pulls back just far enough to look Steve in the face, both of them shocked looking, breathing hard.

“Do it,” Steve whispers, so Bucky pushes his hips up - just a little, not hard enough to push in because they can’t, they can’t here, now, but even the tease, the promise of it, it’s so _good_. Bucky does it again, and again, and then sets his teeth into Steve’s shoulder and comes, shuddering.

The door rattles on its hinges: drunk laughter on the other side. They both freeze. It rattles again and then Steve bawls, “Just piss outside!”

Bucky sets his forehead against Steve’s collarbone. He’s shaking all over. Steve’s belt buckle clinks as Bucky lets him get the both feet on the ground. It’s hardly any louder than the sound of Bucky’s knees hitting the ground.

Steve’s blunt nails scratch against the metal door. Bucky’s mouth is watering. He’s reeling from coming, from how bad he’d missed this. It’s been so long he feels like he’d made up the taste of it, the exact shape of it in his mouth, the familiar smell of Steve’s body. Steve’s hands are back in his hair - not pulling but tense enough Bucky can feel exactly what would happen if he let up for an instant, if he quit trying to gag himself on Steve’s cock.

But that’s not gonna happen. His eyes are closed - he’s lost in it.

 

 

Steve comes with a hard exhale, like Bucky’d punched all the air out of him. Bucky lets Steve’s cock slip out of his mouth, rests his head on the sharp edge of Steve’s hip. Steve is stroking his hair. His other hand lifting Bucky’s chin up, his thumb rubbing over Bucky’s swollen mouth, feeling the shape of his teeth behind it.

After a while Steve says, “Bucky. Hey.”

Bucky rubs his nose over Steve’s skin, feels the brush of his pubic hair, the soft, scant down on his thighs. Kisses Steve’s cock, limp and damp with spit. He knows they need to clean up. Wipe down the room. Go back to being soldiers.

“Don’t throw us away,” Bucky says, and squeezes his eyes shut tight. “Just - don’t throw us away.”

Steve’s quiet for a minute. On the other side of the door are trumpets: the movie’s started.

“Okay, Buck,” Steve says. “I won’t.”

 

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

Operation Snowcap began inauspiciously, with a flight over the gnawing jaws of the Iberian Peninsula to join a supply convoy sailing from Oran. 

Jim stood next to Barnes on the deck and said, “I’ll have dipped my toes in three different oceans, before this is done.” 

Barnes said, “I thought the Mediterranean was a sea.”

Monty said, “Look at you, a regular scholar. Let’s see, Barnes, where is the Mediterranean again?”

“Near Jersey, I think,” Gabe piped up, smiling sideways at Barnes.

“Shaddup,” Barnes said, laughing into the wind so it came out a hollow taut chuckle, like the snap of a sail. No sails around, though; the boat they were on didn’t have any, was almost so big you couldn’t feel the rock of the waves against the hull. The sound they heard instead was the buzz of their escort planes overhead, the drone of the ships all around them.

It was too windy a day to light a cigarette on deck. Jim’s fingers twitched around his pocket anyway, because usually this was when he’d offer one around to break the tension.

They were landing tomorrow.

Jim, Monty, and Barnes had all been a part of beach landings before, all at Salerno. The others asked questions. “Listen, it isn’t all bad,” Monty said. “Last time I landed, the main issue was dressing for the occasion.”

“Huh?” Jim said, recalling how waterlogged the 100th had gotten at Salerno. One of his buddies had lost a boot in the ocean, which had been funny until it wasn’t. 

“I took off my trousers, like,” Monty said, “and put on a pair of swimming trunks I had with me, and put my shirt around my head to keep out the glare. Like a Bedouin.”

“Helmet?” Gabe said. “Or are you dumb as Dugan?”

Monty shrugged, squinting towards the horizon. “I lost it in the surf.”

“It’s a lot colder now,” Barnes noted. They’d seen ice caps passing by under them as they flew over the Atlantic. Jim had never even seen snow before he’d enlisted. Coldest it ever got in Fresno was frost on the fields that’d be gone by morning.

“Swimming trunks may not cut it this time, it’s true,” Monty said.

“You shouldda said,” Barnes said, “won’t float this time, or something like that.”

“Ha,” Gabe said.

Dernier asked a question about underwater mines, which everyone understood by now because ‘mine’ in French sounded like ‘mean,’ and ‘water’ like ‘low.’ Low and mean, that was what they were all right. Jim winced, remembering the depth-charge sound. 

“It’s the ones they fling from the beachhead that do the real harm,” Monty pointed out. “Or the air. The damn Stukas, shoddy though they are.” It was true, the Stuka was no miracle of engineering - and still the sound was enough to shake up a whole platoon. Jim figured that was what they were doing themselves, making a big noise like an animal puffing itself up so as not to be eaten.

“The Germans don’t have the air in Italy,” Rogers said, coming up behind them. He had the same wheeze in his throat he did on land, only now it was mixed with the distinct croak of seasickness. He looked even more gaunt and twitchy here against the flat plane of sky, lit by high unforgiving sunlight, than he did against the dreary drip of England. He took those seasickness pills, the ones that make everyone sleepy, and on top of them took the pills for alertness, so probably it evened out. But either way it left him with his cheeks hollow and no appetite - despite the food onboard the ship being some of the better Army food they’d eaten.

Dugan had still been asleep, leveraging the soporific effect of the pills for all it was worth: he claimed he wanted the trip to pass like a dream.

The Germans didn’t have the air but they did have some of the Atlantic Ocean. Radar picked up two submarines four klicks out a couple days ago, which that night hit and sunk the ship ahead of them in line. The joke of the thing was that the explosions hadn’t bothered Dugan at all. He came out of the episode with nothing more than a rumpled mustache, and ‘what’d I miss?’ had become the joking way all of them asked what was going on when they felt a little worried.

The truth was: they all were.

 

\- 

 

The landing went fine, near the old site their side had established before, this time stripped of all German detritus. The main issue they ran into was some Allied bombers flying zealously overhead. If Jim hadn’t furiously radioed that they were friendlies when they heard the drone, they might have been in trouble. As it was, when they got the rubber rafts to shore and headed back out, they got to watch the contrails of RAF bombers. Monty almost fell out of his raft standing to salute the planes.

 

-

 

They all got a little wet and cold, and Rogers coughed some, which they were used to by now. Jim sent off an all’s-well Morse message to Carter, encoded in the brand-new cipher written on scraps of silk inside his jacket. He made sure to end the message with the dummy characters GFB. Go For Broke, an ode to his old company. A sign that he was who he said he was. The truth was, the 442nd was back in Italy too - it was just that they weren’t the same guys he’d trained with. Rotated out. Gone home, gone broke, bought the farm.

They trekked inland with all their dummy props in a convoy, packed underneath with explosives to blow them all sky-high, if they fell into the wrong hands. The road toward San Onofrio was a hilly and miserable slog that took most of two days. When they stopped for the night Rogers kept them busy painting scraps of fabric, any minor repair to the dummies. As they were laying the dummies flat on the ground, Dugan said with authority, “They’re fine,” and retired to the campfire to knit a pair of socks. But he only added an inch before Barnes told him to get off his ass and patrol.

Jim took the last watch before dawn, and watched the mountains turn blue in the chill air. From far off he watched a farmer begin his day, down in the valley: the lone candle being lit, the stumbling footsteps across his yard towards the animal coops. Every once in awhile Jim put a toe into the ashes of the fire and stirred them enough to keep warm.

Just before dawn Rogers roused himself and came to sit with Jim. They’d kept their word, him and Carter - for once Jim knew as much about the mission as they did, which was to say not much. Rogers seemed about as itchy for orders as the rest of them.

 

-

 

Their mission was a simple one, according to Rogers. While Jim and the others had been locked in cages in Austria, the Allies had split forces - the Brits moving up from the east along the Adriatic Coast, and the Americans slogging their way north from Naples. The Germans had used the end of 1943 to fortify their defensive positions, and the advance of the U.S. Fifth Army had been halted almost completely by the watchful eye of God - or rather, by the monastery crowning the southern edge of the Liri Valley, which was giving the Germans a beautiful advantage in slaughtering any and all approaching forces.

So that was a problem. The second problem - one that Jim understood immediately, after Volturno - were the rivers, which were swollen from the winter rains, or flooded outright across the valley. The ground was too muddy on their side, meaning no tanks, meaning the regiments that had made it across the Gari River had been cut down by Panzers.

But that wouldn’t be a problem for rubber tanks, Rogers had explained, sounding gleeful. Put them on a sturdy enough looking barge, rubber tanks could go anywhere. 

Their task would be to take a battalion of soldiers across the Liri River, a few miles north of where the 90th Panzer Grenadier Division was encamped. When the Panzers reached the Liri, all they’d find were ghosts, and one hell of an ambush: while the spotters would be watching tanks and barges amass on the shore, the 34th would go south along the mountain ridge toward the monastery, break through behind the German line and take the high ground.

But by the time they reach San Onofrio, on February 8th, the plan has changed.

“It looks like Hydra managed to get their tentacles in here as well,” Peggy tells them, after she and Rogers have met with command. “The German shellings are - too accurate to proceed, and a consensus is developing that the Germans have taken the monastery.”

Rogers and Gabe look poleaxed at each other for a second. Maybe they’re both thinking as artists. Jim’s thinking as a soldier: the 34th had lost 2,200 men in three days. He’d had a better chance in the 100th.

“They said they wouldn’t,” Barnes says, looking at Rogers like he wants to reassure him. Rogers gives a look back that seems all Adam’s apple, this being how he expresses skepticism: a large bob of the throat. 

“‘Cause Krauts are famous for always doing what they say,” Dugan says.

“And deception never won any battles,” Monty adds, even drier.

“So we wait," Rogers says. 

“Not much point in sending Captain America out just to get him strafed flat,” Barnes says, already comfortable referring to himself in the third person. If it is him, anyhow. 

“That’s about the size of it,” Peggy says, rueful and less polished in her speech than she is when giving her usual reports. Or maybe Rogers has rubbed off on her. She straightens and shakes her head; not a curl goes out of place. Jim thinks of the ballyhoo that surrounded his cousin Chiyo’s first set of hair curlers back home and wonders how she manages on the front. “This means only a delay,” she says firmly, and Rogers’s shoulders slump as if he’s on the opposite end of a seesaw with her, but he nods too. “We should be able to move out in three days, once the bombing’s done with.”

“ _ Bombing _ ,” Gabe says, sounding sickened. “They’re going to bomb the monastery? It was built in the 11th century.” 

“It’s a key stronghold,” Carter says, pained. “Anywhere else we’ve tried to breach the Gustav line has ended in utter disaster.”

Jim’s been listening to the radio traffic from the Germans. He swallows and says, “Pardon me, Agent, but…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t think there’s Nazis in that monastery.”

Carter’s expression is unreadable. “Is that in your report?”

“It’s going in today’s. I heard traffic that’s them talking about not using it on account of the artistic value and on account of some Italians in there.”

“The first part we know. Are you sure about the second? Soldiers or civilians?”

He shakes his head. “Wasn’t clear. And like Monty says, not even clear if it’s the truth.”

Barnes is looking sideways away from Rogers. Rogers shakes his head, his mouth twisted. “It’s not really new information,” he says.

“So we wait,” Barnes says. Jim digs a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offers them around.

 

-

 

This war is made up of many decisions like this: many voices, all of whom have different stakes in the outcome, weighing one life against another. Of course the Germans’ are weighted less than any of the Allies’, but even that calculus isn’t exact, because if it comes to it, most of them aren’t worth killing either. And then there’s a breakdown of the rest of them, which no one likes to talk about.

The bombing of the monastery happens the next morning, about a mile and a half off from where their group are stationed. They spend it standing sentry on the trucks full of equipment, because even around a friendly camp, it’s top secret stuff in there. Jim and Monty are out listening to German radio traffic at 0800 when the bombs come down. Monty doesn’t salute this time, but tips his head back and brings up his binoculars to watch the slow crumbling of the buildings, as the bombers make a lumbering turn to give it another pass. The sight is spectacular. Thousands of pounds of explosives resound against the thick monastery walls. Artillery batters the whole of the mountain the abbey stands on.

But the promised followup infantry attack doesn’t materialize. 

The next day Jim, Rogers, and Peggy take a half-track out to see what’s going on. They get over a rocky hill that’s pitted by explosions and then a soldier waves them off. 

“Can’t go this way,” the lieutenant says when Peggy demands to know why the road’s blocked. “They’ll have shells down on you in a minute and a half, if you do.”

Rogers crosses his arms and tilts his head up at the Lt. “I thought we got them.”

The Lt. shakes his head, looking scornful at the implications behind the ‘we.’ Then he shrugs, seeing the Captain’s insignia on Roger’s sleeve, and gestures him ahead. “Fine, then, tell you what: go a hundred yards down that road and then reverse as fast as you can. You’ll see; they’ll put a load down just where you were headed.”

“I think I will,” Rogers says coolly, and swings back up on the truck. He’d be impressive, if he didn’t have to sit so far forward to reach the gas pedal. He couldn’t even drive before joining up. Now he guns the engine and they roar off in a spatter of mud, which makes the Lt. jump back. Peggy gives him a sideways look, and Rogers sets his jaw.

They make it a hundred yards down the road and Rogers cuts the engine, then cranes his neck back and reverses the half-track. 

And then, sure enough, about sixty yards ahead, close enough that they get mud and shards of frost thrown at them: the shell comes down. Then another. 

“Fuck,” says Rogers, under his breath. He sounds like Barnes.

They trundle their way back past the Lt., who gives them a jerky nod with his eyebrows up and hand folded behind his back. 

“Cheeky,” Peggy murmurs when they pass, because of the way he made a mockery of standing at parade rest, like it’s a pose he’s put on for the three of them. 

A couple days later, Jim takes down radio communication from a RAF group that’s done aerial reconnaissance over the bombed-out monastery. Turns out the Germans have been able to set up their emplacements even better in the ruins, scrambling in to do it right after the bombs dropped. If they did kill some, it wasn’t enough.

There had been civilians in there, about two hundred Italians taking refuge. And it was for nothing, because the Germans still hold the ground, and now they’ve fortified the mountain even better than they had before. They’re stuck with the 34th and stewing about it - waiting for decisions to be handed down from on high about where to go next. Gabe and Peggy disappear for a little while and her lipstick is suspiciously perfect afterwards. This, Jim feels very uneasy about. Not as a personal thing. But because he’s seen what the Army does when they catch the Negro soldiers even looking at a white woman. He doesn’t say anything, though. He’s always noticed more than most people anyway.

And that’s how it goes, until it doesn’t. It’s three days after St. Valentine’s Day, which is a cruel kind of joke. They’re eating breakfast in their little encampment, which includes real potatoes cooked in the coals of their fire until they’re black on the outside. There’s a mess hall, but back with the Americans it’s all segregated; Jim and Gabe aren’t allowed to eat there, or at least not at the same time as everyone else. Barnes juggles a hot potato and throws it at Rogers, who catches it two-handed and says, “Strike.”

“I’m writing a letter to my wife,” Monty proclaims. “It will be all beautiful lies. Tell me your most dashing story of bravery, o Captain America.” He says it like the ‘o’ has no ‘h’ on it. Fancy.

“Well,” Barnes says, sprawling backwards against a log they’ve drawn up to the fire. He settles in next to Rogers, close, as they do sometimes, when no one but themselves are around. Rogers relaxes a little into Barnes’ body. Jim looks away, down at the page in front of him, which is blank but for its salutation. He’s got a flower he’s pressed into shape on it, a poppy he’s kept with him for a long time. It’s faded red, like a sparrow’s breast. 

“Just yesterday,” Barnes says, “I caught a shell full-on, just grabbed it before it could go off and threw it back at the Germans. And then of course my sidekick Limey the Terrible - ”

“Pardon me, I thought we were going with the Union Jack.”

“Oh yeah,” Gabe says, looking up briefly. “Those  _ comics _ . As long as they don’t call me the Blackjack something-or-other, I guess it’s all right. Are we all Jacks?”

“We’re all Jims.”

“Limey, ce n’est pas gentil,” Dernier says, chuckling and shaking his head. Ce n’est pas gentil, that’s an understatement he makes a lot. The Germans bombed the road: that’s not nice. He goes on, winking at Monty, “Comme les ‘rosbifs.’” A slur on Brits.

“Roast beef indeed. All too rare, these days,” Monty says.

“Well done,” comments Barnes, and Jim groans long and loud. 

Barnes cranes his head, looking for Rogers’ reaction to his joke, but Rogers isn’t looking at him. Instead, he’s sitting up, stock still, and blinking into the flames like he’s seen the future there.

“What if,” he says slowly, “Captain America did catch a few shells? And threw them back....”

There’s a silence. Flame crackles. Paper crackles under Jim’s fingers as he idly folds his letter, not sure he’s liking where this is going.

“What do you mean?” Barnes and Gabe say at the same time, like they’re used to this. Jim glances up at the sky, as if for deliverance. Dernier looks eager, twirling one side of his mustache. He likes talk of shells. Lately he’s been telling all of them, in French-smattered English, about his plans for tree-mounted bombs that can spray shrapnel in a radius even if soldiers hit the deck. Jim feels a little ill about that, remembering his infantry days. 

“Nothing,” Rogers says, after a silence. He shakes his head. “It’s just - ”

Next to Jim, the radio crackles, and he holds up a hand for silence. After a moment, he gropes for his cipher book, and Gabe for his own, throwing aside the scraps of paper onto which he has been writing his own letter - goodness knows to whom. 

“News?” Rogers says.

Jim and Gabe exchange a long look. “General Clark moved out with his men against orders. They plan to march on Rome.”

“But - ” Rogers drags a hand over his hair; it stands up like cotton fluff and then settles back down. “But that’s giving up our position here. That’s letting the Germans have Monte Cassino.”

“You’re not one to talk about disobeying orders,” Barnes murmurs.

“That’s not the - ”

“Same?”

“Our position wasn’t at stake. The Germans will just use the opportunity to shore up the Gustav line, and we’ll never break through.” Now Rogers is sitting forward, mouth set, hand clasped so the knuckles show red and chapped. He draws the eye, Rogers, even though he’s small. Jim stares at him, trying to figure out what he’s thinking.

“Captain America against the whole German Tenth?” Dugan says, snorting. 

“Captain America,” Dernier says thoughtfully. “Et les Jacques….”

“Not you too,” Barnes says, rolling his eyes heavenward.

“We were going to start out down the highway, make it look like we were advancing faster than we are,” Rogers says. They all nod; that was the new plan, since they’d assumed that the bombing would let the Allies break through the German defenses. “But now Clark really has done that… He’s called our bluff for us. So what if we don’t fake that. What if we circle around behind the Germans and draw them away from the road?”

“And what’s the point of that?”

“They’re trying to get Clark back. They just said it, on the radio,” Gabe says, slow, and Rogers nods.

“We could make that happen.”

“You think he’d come back for Captain America, when he wouldn’t come back for Winston goddamn Churchill?”

“Winston Churchill,” Dugan says with broad delight, “Is a Limey.”

They radio to Peggy, who relays a message to Phillips. Steve goes to talk to General Tuker, who’s higher-up than Clark - Clark’s a three-star general, one they say is prone to getting spooked, maybe too cautious. The thing is, Jim can’t entirely blame him for steering his soldiers out of harm’s way to try for Rome. But Rogers is right, too. 

When Rogers comes back he’s smiling, and Jim’s guts clench up even before Rogers says, “It’s vital we capture Monte Cassino. It’ll give us the whole of the Liri Valley and make it impossible for the Germans to hold the line. It’ll take some maneuvering on our part to circle around the back and the terrain’s against the real army. But we let ‘em know Captain America has his ways of getting a bunch of soldiers to places in a stealthy sort of way.”

“They’ve been bombing everything,” Jim protests. “They seem to know where we are…”

“They don’t have any technology we don’t,” Rogers says firmly.

“Right,” Dernier says. He says, “We could always make the terrain less hop - hospitable, non?” He rubs his hands together, already planning. Meanwhile, Dugan squints at the horizon, palms up, thinking how he might set up tanks.

The fundamental craziness of the plan remains. 

Barnes and Rogers hole up in their tent for a while and there are muffled sounds of argument from inside. Barnes stomps out only mostly in uniform, pulling on the Captain America cowl he seems to wear sometimes to cover up his expressions when he’s feeling sour. He huffs up next to Jim and stands in a city-boy slump, hand groping for pockets he hasn’t got: the suit zips up tight, though it has pockets lower down on the thigh in hidden panels.

Jim offers him a cigarette and Barnes about sucks the cherry of it down his throat, then coughs and waves off smoke.

 

 

“Catching shells,” Barnes says. “We’re really doing it.”

Jim tips him an ironical salute. “Captain.”

“Don’t look at me, you’ve got the hard part.” It’s true: Jim has to stay attentive to the German radio signals as they direct artillery, since they have to keep just a jump ahead of where the shells will fall. Then it’s on Dernier to plant mines where the Germans think they’ve destroyed the American tanks. When they come through with an infantry sweep after shelling, they’ll be blown sky-high.

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

They make every mistake in the book, on purpose, trying to let the Germans spot them. Jim has to fight every hard earned instinct he’s developed during the war. He doesn’t hop frequencies. He transmits using the older codes, the ones based on simple letter transposition, the ones the enemy can crack in a moment. His skin crawls, knowing Hydra and the rest of the Nazis are listening in. He uses the codename for Cap they’ve fed the enemy very carefully.

When they get to the kickoff point, Dugan does much of the heavy lifting, which is what he’s there for - but with every second counting, every man but Jim gets to work setting up the imaginary company they have moving into position north of Monte Cassino. Jim’s sending them orders by radio. Captain America lifts tanks like they weigh as much as barbells. This time, they’ve even set up some dummy infantry near the shadow tanks, using paper cutouts that have been arranged in spirals, so that they move with the wind as if they are real people.

One of the double agents working for Hydra, whom no one has even seen but Agent Carter but whom she assures them can be trusted, tells them within an hour that their ruse has worked. Hydra thinks the dummy tanks are real. They would’ve known soon enough anyway: barely twenty minutes later they have to hunker down while the Luftwaffe passes overhead. The plane is almost too high to be seen, not daring to risk RAF retaliation, but it casts shade like a big dark predatory bird, passing over the bumpy, frosty terrain. Jim knows the aerial reconnaissance photos will show what they want, what they’ve practiced: a massed army. 

A shadow puppet army.

The Germans start shelling a little after 1030. Rogers, Monty, and Jim all listen carefully to the German radio signals as they aim closer and closer to their actual positions. 

“Forty one thirty nine eighteen, thirteen eighty-two four!” Jim shouts to Rogers, who puts up his hand to force them to hold their place. The coordinates are marked out in a grid in their heads, burned into their brains. They have to stay within a mile or so of where the Germans think they are to keep sending radio signals: in one half-track, him and Rogers and Monty - who is on a second radio pretending to be an entire British detachment working with the Americans - and Dugan driving the other with Barnes, who in his red-white-and-blue is the target they’re directing the Germans to aim at.

A shell strikes less than five hundred yards away. The ground erupts in dirt and little scraps of trees and rocks, banging up against the windows. It is impossible to get used to the sound, to the spray of shrapnel. They play recordings themselves, of men’s voices in the distance and gunfire and shouts - shouts of wounded, visible in the background behind their radio broadcasts. The sounds are realistic. They were taken from other battlefields.

But the shell strikes are louder. Morita can feel his lips moving, thanking God maybe that it drowns out what? Their own deception?

Shells sound like train cars.

“Just like living near the BMT!” Rogers shouts, and Monty says, “What?” 

Rogers says, “The BMT!”

“Haven’t any notion!”

Now Rogers is the one yelling “What?”

Jim shakes his head and puts his headphones back on, listening to the radio once his hammering heart slows. Whatever Rogers says, he won’t get used to the sound of shells anytime soon. Like a lion’s roar, it shocks him every time. Howard is working on some technology to weaponize a sonic boom, and Jim has the uncomfortable feeling the Nazis may get there first. But they haven’t yet. 

German Morse floods in and he consults the translation book, now dog-eared and scuffed from much handling. The Germans, dependent on ULTRA for long range codes, are lazy with their field ciphers. And their code names are ludicrously on-the-nose. He gives the coordinates to Rogers, and the half-track roars to life. Around them, shreds of neoprene flutter like ghosts in the harsh winter breeze, skidding over the ground. One catches like a flag on the rear bumper of their half-track and waves there, a little scrap of what used to be a tank. They move forward.

They are creating a sort of concentric ring up in the mountains. As the German bombings advance, following Rogers, Monty, and Jim, Gabe and Dernier move up behind them, setting up the scene to look from above like realistic destruction and laying mines in place in their wake, so that the German infantry will stumble upon them when they advance. They also reinflate some neoprene tanks that will have begun to droop, muzzles slumping to the ground like flaccid elephant trunks. In the cold, the air that’s expanded to fill the neoprene condenses. Later, if it warms up and expands too much, the tanks will pop. That’ll give the Germans a surprise.

It’s backbreaking, finger-breaking work. Jim’s knuckles go raw with cold, fumbling with the radio dial, and the fizz of crackling static puts him to mind of a snap-crackling fire, absent the heat he yearns for. Back home on the flat wide fields of Fresno he recalls trundling in his tractor with his chichi, sweat trickling, the smell of hot cows all around like a fumous itching blanket. He’d take even cow shit now, over this cordite-scented chill. All the stink of combustion. None of the warmth. 

It’s always worse for Rogers. As they drive up to the rendezvous point Barnes is already out and waiting. He comes quick towards Rogers as they yank their half-track to a halt, who pushes him off with one hand. As they all gather, Barnes puts a hand on his shoulder anyway, and Rogers lets him. 

Jim sees it as he knows what to look for - for a while he tried not to see it, something in his brain flinching away from the picture of it the way he flinches away from looking directly at dead men. He has this sense that there was something wrong and ignoring it or trying to paint a different image in his brain might help. But no: they stand exactly like that, like two people who are used to each other’s bodies, maybe not exactly like a man and a woman, not as gentle, but even that’s confusing - it’s something he can’t quite put words to. Even in a battlefield, he can see that Barnes wants to snake an arm over Rogers’s shoulders and grab him. Like a kid brother, but - Jim shivers - not like that, either.

“Alright,” Rogers says, voice deep and furry with asthma that worsens in the chill air. It’s the voice of a much larger man. “Jones and Dernier have their pieces in place. The bombing’s gone pretty quiet. Morita, the Germans think we’ve got Cap out here?”

Jim nods. 

“They’re sending out infantry soon, Carter says,” Rogers goes on, clearing his throat with an impatient, hoarse cough. “Oh, and we figure they’ve dropped a few thousand-dollar bombs,” he adds with satisfaction. It’s a funny thing, war: it’s not just about killing. It’s about beggaring the opponent of money as well as of lives. They all know how much their equipment costs, they know how much their bombs cost. They know that the Captain America comics that sell war bonds keep them alive, as if they’re buying lives. They’re saving lives out here, but to the army brass, they’re also saving money, the money that would otherwise be used to build real tanks rather than ones made of neoprene.

It’s a cold calculation. 

 

-

 

Dernier and Jones show up at the rendezvous looking scuffed and winded and a little soot-streaked. Dernier and Dugan burst into an avid discussion, Dugan being a fan of Dernier’s explosives. Their communication takes place mostly in gesture and expression and burst of mangled French and English, respectively. Rogers has his binoculars trained from where he perches on the top of his half-track. There’s a boom in the near distance: one of Dernier’s mines has gone off.

“Incoming,” Rogers shouts, bug-eyed even when he lets the binoculars flop down from over his eyes. They’re special lenses Stark made, to let even his astigmatism work through them. Beside him, Jones hops down off the half-track too and pulls out the giant Browning he’s had stowed in the truck bed. His flair for the theatrical shows up even in his choice of weaponry. Jim himself sticks to a lighter M3 grease gun, and shifts it now from its strap to his palms, settling his shoulders under the new load.

A couple of Heinies straggle out of the sparse tree cover behind a little outcropping of rock. Jim glances at Dugan and Dernier. Dernier shrugs. A few have made it past the mines - probably not many, and one of those they can see is limping, his coal-scuttle helmet dented on one side and sitting askew on his head.

Barnes, perched on the half-track near Rogers, cocks his rifle. The white A is stark between his eyes, and the star on his chest flashes dully in the winter light. It’s almost impossible to see his expression behind the mask: all Jim can make out is the narrowing of his eyes as he stares through the scope. They all pause to let him shoot, because supersoldier or not he’s the best sniper on the team. 

One blast - two - and the first soldier drops, helmet flinging off behind him like slapstick, twirling through the air and bumping to a stop on the ground after its owner has. Barnes nods to himself, jaw set. 

“Ah bon,” Dernier says with satisfaction, rubbing his hands together. Monty shoots down the last straggler and holsters his Webley revolver with a flourish. He’s just turned to Dernier to say something when the muzzle of a real, solid tank breaks over the ridgeline and the sound of German 20mms rip through the air.

Jim slaps a hand on his own head to secure his helmet and takes a dive for the dirt, cursing and wishing he’d set himself up closer to the emergency foxholes they’d dug. Dugan is still standing feet planted, so Jim knocks him over at the back of the knees. He crumples, almost kicking Jim in the face, and his bowler hat rolls away, flopping into the foxhole itself like it’s seeking shelter there.

They crawl forward and Jim tips himself sideways into the foxhole, coming up to peek over the edge. He sees Barnes has swung himself out of the half-track, which has been hit with shrapnel from a nearby burst of fire. One of the tires hisses, leaking air. Rogers still has the damn binoculars up, and Barnes is shouting something at him, then finally seems to give up and throws the big damn shield right at him. Rogers catches it and yanks Jones behind it with him just in time for a 20mm to explode with a crack on its front - the Vibranium makes a high singing sound like a tortured soprano’s aria, but it holds. Rogers peers up over the rim, shocked, and then ducks again as Gabe scrambles behind him down into the foxhole adjacent to Jim’s. 

“Get down!” Barnes shouts at Rogers, motioning frantically, but Rogers shakes his head and yanks open the door of the half-track, tugging Barnes by the sleeve until he thumps down behind the half-open door. Tank fire zings by close and and a shot cracks the thick glass of the door. “Fuck!” Barnes says.

Jim agrees. But this, too, is part of their crazy plan. The tank might be a little early, but they knew she’d be knocking on their door sooner or later.

It’s still some distance off, maybe a kilometer or more, firing at them from the next ridge over. Infantry must have taken the brunt of the mines, although the tank looks scorched and reluctant to move. It won’t have to, of course - it can kill them just fine from where it is. 

Jim wiggles out of the foxhole on his belly, keeping low, and joins Barnes and Rogers at the half-track. The cab is shredded, maybe not driveable, but the compartment where his radio is looks okay. Monty’s returning fire, stuck some yards away behind a cluster of boulders. 

“So what now?” Barnes asks, pulling a grenade loose from his belt. 

Jim takes a glance up over the hood and tells him, “Two o’clock, group of three, maybe - a hundred yards.”

There’s a little  _ pfft  _ of sound as the hydraulic pump in Barnes’ gloves launches the grenade into space. It’s a clean hit, and the three Heinies fall down. “Gonna scout me for the Dodgers!” Barnes yells, which confuses Jim for a moment; he’s never liked baseball too much.

The tank fires again, and they all duck, though it wouldn’t do much good. The shell hits on the mountain above them and the air turns muddy and dark for a moment. Through the side mirror of the half track Jim can see more soldiers coming up over the ridge. 

Rogers isn’t looking that way; he’s craning his neck back the way they came, binoculars stuck to his face. Dugan and Dernier are shooting too, from their foxhole. Dugan’s mustache and eyebrows are clogged with dirt. 

“That big crater!” Rogers shouts. Jim can barely hear him over the rattle of gunfire, the plink and thud of the bullets hitting metal and earth around them. “Forty one hundred and one, eleven nineteen oh five three!”

They hadn’t even bothered with mines at those coordinates, a thick ring of trees and a sudden drop. It had taken eight days of bloody fighting for the II Corps to get a foothold in the mountains north of the abbey, and the landscape around them was dotted with scars. “May and I’ll take that,” and Rogers points at the other half-track, sheltered from the bombardment, “we’ll cover the hole. You lead them to us.”

Jim hefts his grease gun, wipes one palm and then the other against his chest, wondering who May was, if that was a codename. Barnes’ jaw works. He makes a motion towards Rogers and then checks it and moves one gloved hand to grip Rogers’ skinny shoulder. 

“Okay,” he says. “You be careful.”

“You too,” Rogers says. He and Jones scramble into the half-track and roar off down the road, the rest of them laying down covering fire.

In the commotion, Monty’s able to run across to them. He sags back against the door. His mustache is much cleaner than Dugan’s. “Well now, shall we give them hell?” he says, and Jim laughs.

“They’ll need a minute,” Barnes says tightly.

“One Mississippi,” Dugan roars, over the sound of his tommy gun, and Barnes cracks just a little and says, “That in France?”

He grabs Jim by the arm and hustles them into the foxhole. It’s hot and abruptly quieter crowded in with him and Dugan and Monty and Dernier, who all cock an ear to hear their orders. He feels the ground tremble; the tank is starting to move. 

Barnes’ face is grim. “All right, you heard the Captain,” he said. “Frenchie, you’re first out. Make sure those mines are all right. You two follow, lead the infantry that way. You remember what I taught you?”

_“Er zol kakn mit blit un mit ayter,”_ Dugan says, grinning. 

“The German stuff,” Barnes groans, and shakes his head. “Jim, you’re with me.” 

“Where’re we going?” Jim says. All he can smell is wet cold earth and the sweat coming off all of them. Go for broke.

Barnes shakes his head again, this time maybe at himself, or at God above, and says, “We’re gonna catch some shells.”

The moment that you turn and run is the worst in Jim’s life, every time he has to do it. To lay bare the back of your neck, your ass, the broad plane of your body, and run. Ten yards to the treeline. A short and vertical scramble over the ridge. The tank will take the easy way around, the only way it can - the thin road that winds down from the monastery. Infantry will follow behind, hurrying to keep up. 

This, again - mistakes they make with every step, never running so fast that the spotters can’t see Barnes’ bright blue shoulders through the trees - zigzagging through the terrain maps they all carry in their heads.

And then they melt away, like ghosts.

Jim fetches up against an outcropping of stone, breathing hard. Far off he hears: “ _Hier lang! Mir nach!_ ” and, “ _Lauft ihr da entlang!_ ”

Even Dugan’s accent is better than Jim’s attempts.

And then: Captain America bursts through the trees, running full out. Legs pumping, arms up, dirt kicking up behind him. And Jim gapes, honestly gapes - and then the grinding of the tank, plowing right through the scrubby forest on Barnes’ heels, and he can only watch as Barnes breaks through that last ring of trees and kicks off into space - 

The tank follows. Barnes hits the ground, and the tank does too, crashing right through the camouflaged tarp Rogers and Jones had laid out for it. Barnes has leapt right across the hole in the ground. The tank lodges there grinding furiously away at the dirt, its treads helplessly, ineffectually churning, eating up the camouflaged piece of tarp they’d used to cover the hole. It’s stuck like a gopher Jim once saw trying to fit its way into a hole too small for it. It’s almost funny, but for the wildly swiveling gun turret that will regain its aim all too soon.

Jim breaks cover and runs towards the tank just as Barnes clambers on top of it.  _ Pfft  _ go Barnes’ gloves again, and the hatch yanks all the way free, staggering him backwards. Jim sprays the interior of the tank with bullets.

 

 

Behind them, in quick succession, are four explosions as the remaining German soldiers follow Dugan and Monty’s calls right into Dernier’s mines. Then  _ pop pop pop _ as the survivors are picked off. And then everything is very, very quiet.

Rogers and Jones materialize from the trees, both of them smeared liberally with dirt. Jim can’t even see where they’ve hidden the half-track. Barnes gives Rogers a hand up onto the defeated tank. Jim gives a hand to Jones, and they stand for a moment looking at the five dead Germans in the tank.

He stares at the faces around him. Barnes has yanked off that hood of his and his hair sticks matted to his forehead, like Frankenstein’s Monster. He absently scrubs it aside. Rogers blinks in something like surprise and his mouth twitches, then firms up. There’s high color in his face. His cheeks are all red and he’s - he’s more collected than Jim would’ve thought. He’s still holding the big round shield, leaning on it actually, one end dug into the ground.

“You hear that?” he asks.

Jim listens hard. One of the dead soldiers tilts over to the side inside the tank, and something metal plinks and rolls. He thinks he can even hear the dull drip of blood. 

“No more shelling,” Jones says, and casts his eyes up the mountainside, towards the abbey they can just barely see jutting out over the edge of its high cliff.

“Maybe they don’t wanna shell their own men,” Barnes says.

“Maybe,” Rogers says, “or maybe they’re outta ammunition."

“Radio to Tuker,” he tells Jim. “Let him know Captain America has captured Hill 593, and can mount an assault on Monastery Hill. That oughta get Clark back.”

By the time Dugan and Monty have returned to declare their part of the mission a success, and Dernier has drawn up a little map with the coordinates of the mines they’ve planted that never went off, Jim has managed to pull the radio out of the Germans’ wrecked tank. He finds the right frequency, but first sends a message out to Carter in Morse. ACES. GFB. That means mission accomplished.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

 

The battle for Monte Cassino lasts nine days. Clark’s swift return from the road to Rome drives a wedge between the Germans’ line of resupply and the soldiers who had swarmed over the ruined abbey. Turns out they  _ were _ out of shells.

They don’t see most of it - Phillips orders them swiftly out of combat and back to the job they’re supposed to be doing. They listen at a distance to the sound of guns and other men dying, heads bent over their own particular tasks. A whole world of soldiers had been ordered for when the Americans abandoned Monte Cassino to fill in the gaps left behind: Gurkha Rifles from Nepal, Maoris from New Zealand, engineers from South Africa, two whole divisions of Poles, and the road must be cleared for them to arrive safely. 

Rogers and Dugan steal away each night to take down road signs and put up false ones, and spy on the Germans as they shuffle troops across the Gustav line. To keep their feathers from ruffling around Cassino, Jim and Gabe take to the radios, casting dummy signal traffic for the Nazis that a seaborne landing is being planned, north of Rome. From Carter’s double agent, they receive word that the 26th and 90th Panzer divisions have been quietly ordered to the coast. 

They all breathe easier, except for Jim; as soon as the Indian troops arrive they’re being sent back down the hill in bags, and Jim sweats and curses for a full day until Gabe tells him that the radio’s under control.

“You sure?” Jim asks, hesitant 

“Go do that voodoo that you do,” Gabe says, already replacing the headset over his ears, but he smiles when Jim claps him hard on the back and heads to the medical tent to offer his help.

And Barnes, well - Captain America spends two days up on Snakehead Ridge testing just how bulletproof Stark’s costume is, and he and Monty and Dernier are among the first inside what used to be one hell of a church and is now one hell of a tomb.

 

-  
  


The strangest sight after it’s all over isn’t Captain America, still in full battle kit, tossing boulders over his head so the rest of them can drag dead Germans and Italians out of the rubble so they can be laid out. It’s the bear some Polish soldiers from the 22nd Artillery Supply Company bring along on a little leash, carrying crates of ammunition on its back.

Jim watches as the thing snuffles its way through the scrub. It’s a brown bear, smallish, and the harness it wears makes it look somewhat like a paratrooper.

“They said their Sergeant Major’s a real bear in the morning,” Barnes murmurs, and Jim almost chokes on the stick of Wrigley’s he’s just jammed in his mouth. 

“We had a bear,” Dugan says, ignoring him. “It danced.”

“‘Bout as well as you, probably,” Jim says. 

“Better,” says Dugan generously, as if he’s more proud of the circus bear than he is of himself. “Actually, we set it up so’s we wrestled. Part of the strongman act. I won, of course.”

“I wonder if Captain America could beat a bear,” Gabe says, clapping Barnes on the shoulder. Then he lets his hand slide off, like he’s been stung. Maybe it’s that other troops are watching and wouldn’t want to see a Negro with his hands on Captain America, or maybe it’s the funny look Rogers has just given them.

“I have it on good authority that bear ranks only a Private,” Monty informs them. “It could get in real trouble for striking a superior officer.”

“Like Captain America’s any more of a - ” Barnes starts, then clamps his mouth shut.

“They’re talking medals,” Monty goes on serenely. “Mind you, I was under the impression the Americans gave those out for putting your boots on the proper feet.”

One of the Poles, meanwhile, has approached, holding out a hand to Captain America. He says something unintelligible. Jim glances at Jones, who is their default linguist, and Jones shrugs and shakes his head. The Pole stops and slaps his chest. “Jakub!” he says. He draws himself up and pronounces, in his best American accent, quoting the announcer from the USO reels, “And now, the Captain America! Hero of Allies!” 

Barnes smiles and softens a little, and then Jakub shakes his hand. Then Jones’s. Jones is somewhat surprised. The rest of the Poles gather soon enough and they talk using mostly enthusiastic hand signals and fragments of English. One of them turns to talk to a comrade of his in another language, one that’s familiar. Barnes answers in surprise; Jim watches the Polish man blink back, startled, and then launch into a torrent of what’s got to be Yiddish. 

Jim, meanwhile, isn’t quite sure how to converse outside of Morse. He watches the rest of the guys and shakes a few hands, then defaults to taking out his pack of Lucky Strikes - a popular and coveted brand among soldiers of all nationalities and stripes - and handing them around. He’s just paused to light up his own when he turns and hears a shout.

The bear has approached and now rears up right in front of him, pawing at the air. Even Dugan takes a step back, and Barnes has his pistol cocked before Jim can even blink. Monty dances away, almost tripping over a clod of frozen dirt, and Rogers’s head jerks back in surprise. 

Jim freezes. The cigarette hangs trembling from his lip and he stares at the animal, which, while maybe small for a bear, is taller than he is when on its hind legs. Its breath smells like that of his brother’s dog after it’s been snuffling around the chicken coop: sharp with hay and pungently metallic.

They haven’t cut its claws. They’re sharp and black, like polished fingernails. Its eyes are huge.

Jim hears laughter. It’s the Poles. 

“Wojtek,” one of them says chidingly, and starts talking to the bear, which swings its head around ponderously, like it’s disappointed. The soldier strokes it behind the ear affectionately. He says something to Barnes.

Barnes has his pistol lowered, now, and cautiously tucks it back into his belt. He says something in Yiddish to the Polish soldier, who must also be a Jew. The Polish soldier grins and makes a gesture, and Barnes laughs, startled.

“He wants you to give the bear a cigarette,” he tells Jim.

Jim blinks. “What?”

“Wojtek,” says one of the soldiers, gesturing. 

“Uh, the bear’s name is Wojtek, Wojtek wants a cigarette.” 

Tentatively, slowly, Jim reaches into his pocket. He wonders if this is a joke. He shakes a cigarette out into his palm and then holds it out toward the bear, the tip in his fingers. The bear swings its head away.

The Pole says something, and Barnes translates, “You gotta light it first.”

“You serious?” Jim said, out of the corner of his mouth. Barnes shrugs. 

Jim thinks for a second and then he says, “Okay. Why doesn’t Captain America give it to him?”

“Captain America!” comes the shout, repeated until it echoes out through the ranks of soldiers.

And that’s how the war photographer attached to one of the companies winds up snapping a photograph of Captain America handing a lit cigarette to a bear.

 

 

“Yasher koah!” the Polish soldier says. 

“What’s that?” Dugan mutters.

“Good going,” Barnes says, lighting a cigarette of his own and watching the bear puff and snuffle. “It means, good going.”

“Yasher koah,” Jim says.

 

-

 

He doesn’t see Sergeant Barnes until the next night, lurking out near the latrines. He startles when he sees Jim, and then relaxes. “Whaddaya doin’ out here?” Barnes asks.

“Could ask you the same thing,” Jim says, and accepts one of Barnes’ cigarettes. They’re back in the main camp, which is about as noisy as any other base Jim’s ever been stationed at, although if Barnes is hiding he picked a decently secluded spot - even if it smells like piss, which was Jim’s reason for being there.

“Everyone wants to shake my damn hand,” Barnes mumbles, around his own cigarette. “I took off the costume but half the guys wandering past’re wondering where Captain America is and when they can shake his damn hand. I was going out of my head, and then -”

He stops talking abruptly and rubs a hand through his hair. Jim can sympathize. He feels about ready to shake off his own skin, if only to get rid of the smell of blood and shit that feels like it’s painted on him. That morning the Germans had tried to regain the railroad station in Cassino town through some deception of their own: a thick blanket of smoke had been laid down at dawn, and the battalion guarding it had been caught unaware. Jim can still smell it all over his hands, acrid even over the cigarette smoke and the piss stench. They might’ve won the hill, but the shooting hasn’t stopped.

He feels like he could fall down and sleep a hundred years, but he felt like that for the last three nights running and hadn’t managed much sleep at all.

Barnes looks around, furtive, and steps close. “They’re sending us to France,” he says. “Something big in the works they’re calling Overlord. They don’t know where we come in yet but -”

Jim leans back, passes a hand over his face. Barnes is close enough Jim can smell soap and the stuff he’s got slicking his hair back and something else, something faint and sour that makes him feel like he’s back in the med tent. Barnes doesn’t notice; his attention’s been caught by men passing some distance off, loud and laughing. Jim puts an elbow in his side just to startle away that stillness.

“Come on,” he says, and flicks his cigarette away.

Barnes waits while he pisses, and they walk together back towards their little city of tents. Carter’s made an appearance; Barnes takes one look at her and Rogers and Jones cuddled up over a densely marked up notepad, and makes a beeline for the card game being dealt on the other side of the fire. 

Jim lingers, eyes on the bottles of beer lined up in front of Dugan’s tent. Even Carter has one, dark and glinting in her pale hands. He’d give just about anything for coffee instead, or the tea he gave up drinking around the same time he gave up speaking Japanese, the bitter barley they grew themselves next to the chicken houses. He takes a bottle though, when Barnes looks up and realizes Jim’s still standing there at the edge of the light.

They’ve played three rounds and Dugan’s lost as many packs of cigarettes when Dernier appears and proclaims, “We’re going to town.”

“Where’s town,” Barnes asks, with a crooked smile, like he’s expecting someone to quiz him about his geography again. He’s been all crooked smiles, back in the camp - his hands steady around his cards. If Jim hadn’t seen him hunched and crazed-looking down by the latrines, he’d think Barnes hadn’t a care in the world. 

“A little while,” Dernier says, vague. “We have been invited.  _ Captain America  _ has been invited.”

Barnes grimaces, but is overruled - in short order there’s five of them piling into a Jeep, beer bottles clinking between their their feet. Gabe and Carter had stayed behind, but to Jim’s surprise so had Monty: he’d lifted one eyebrow, said, “I know better,” and turned back to the letter he was writing to his wife.

To call their destination a town is a stretch. Most of Cassino has been bombed to hell and back, and the countryside is salted with mines. They have to drive for a while to find anywhere that doesn’t look like a crater, and the place makes Fresno seem like New York City. There are little shops, closed now, and Dernier translates the signs for them: dry goods, livery. Looks like it was a nice place to live, back before the war showed up.

They’re going to a home on the edge of town, that some of the Poles managed to give Dernier directions to. It's set back a ways back but even so Jim can hear the sound of music and laughter bright and clear, all the way down the road. Three stories, rough hewn brick, vines climbing up the gate that Jim touches hesitantly as they pass. They’re dead, of course. It’s the middle of winter and the place has a familiar look that he doesn’t piece together until they’re nearly at the door: it’s the look of a farm with no one there to care for it.

Inside is warm, and bright, and full of girls. A cheer goes up as they walk through the door: “Let’s hear it for Captain America!” and they’re drawn into a group in short order. Poles and Americans and some Brits, and the  _ girls _ \- 

Even the girls have seen the Captain America reels, somewhere or other.

Dugan hands over a few of the AM-lire notes they were all issued once they didn’t die on the beach landing, and bottles make their way onto the big, rough-cut table. The liquor inside is clear as water and tastes like gasoline, and makes even Dugan cough and pound his chest after the first swig. Jim’s a little more cautious with his glass, but everyone around them wants to drink with Captain America and his famous commandos, and it’s not too long before they’ve emptied the first bottle and then the second between all of them.

For a while it’s nice, cozy. Jim’s tucked in the corner between Rogers, who brought a sketchbook and isn’t doing much talking, and Dernier, whose attention is on one of the Italian girls, gracefully allowing him to pour her drinks. It’s fine with Jim, even if he can feel some of the Americans staring at him once in awhile. He doesn’t have too much to say anyway, and when he leans back in his chair, away from the liquor and perfume smell drifting across the table, he can smell the herbs hanging in bunches along the beam over his head, still fragrant with summertime.

There are light spots on the wall where pictures hung. Jim wonders what they’d been. 

Barnes is the first one to catch on. He’d been dancing with one of the girls, but bowed out when they came to the end of the record. He wanders back over to their table and puts one heavy hand on the back of Rogers’ chair before straightening up and tucking it back in his pocket.

“You brought us to the cathouse,” he says to Dernier. 

“Quoi?” Dernier says, peering up at him unsteadily. 

_“Putain,”_ Dugan says, and Dernier laughs. He’s got a girl under his arm, and says something to her. French has enough in common with Italian that they both think whatever it is, is funny. 

Jim’s face feels hot, from the grappa and the music and the heated air in the room. He’d thought - well, he didn’t think much of it, other than that the farm didn’t belong to these girls, but maybe to the old woman who’d been sitting in the other room, exchanging bottles for lire. Exchanging something, at least.

There’s a touch on his shoulder: dark hair, big smile. The swell of her breasts is soft and enticing under the open collar of her dress. _“Vuoi ballare?”_ she asks. Monty had known better.

“No, no,” he fumbles, “Grazie.” He turns back to his drink but she stays and rubs a hand over his shoulders.

“Whassamatter,” Dugan says, “you don’t want some company?”

“I got a,” Jim says, slurring a little, “I got a girl,” but then he looks up and sees the expression on Dugan’s face. Dugan looks away, casts that gaze across the crowded room. Someone’s changed the record and it scratches restlessly before the trumpets start to play again: a distant, brassy honk. One muddy, booted foot is braced on the empty chair next to him. He’s sitting with his legs spread wide, one broad hand on his thigh. The chair he’s sprawled in looks like it’d been hand carved. 

“Get your damn feet off that,” Jim tells him.

Dugan snorts into his drink and scrapes the sole of his boot idly down the leg of the chair.

The woman has maneuvered, meanwhile, around Jim’s seat, and settles onto one of his knees, glancing behind her curiously to see his reaction. He curls a hand around her waist instinctively, to keep her balanced. She smells of cheap lavender scent, not the gardenia Mika used. There’s a smoky harshness to the stuff.

_“Son’ tutti finocchi?”_ she says, curiously, looking away from Jim and leaning over to Dernier. 

The thud of Dugan’s boot on the stone flooring is hard enough to make the record jump, and also the girl on Jim’s knee. “Who you calling finocchi?” he snarls.

Jim looks round automatically for Gabe, but he’s not here, so there’s Dernier, his mouth uncomfortably half-open. He lets out an uneasy chuckle: the same in every language, it means he doesn’t quite know what to say. Barnes, too, has stopped and is looking over at them, his drink tipped halfway toward his mouth. He and Rogers both are frozen.

Jim wonders if ‘finocchi’ means something like ‘Jap.’

The girl has stood up and says, _“Eh, lo so bene, baffo?” _

Dugan’s flushed red all the way up to his hairline, and he reaches out and snakes an arm around the woman’s waist before Jim can react, palm flat on the warm curve of her hip where it’s been resting on Jim’s leg. She squeals indignantly at the rough treatment, staggering back into Jim to keep from being yanked sideways.

Jim’s hand goes up to grab Dugan’s wrist - and stops when he meets his eyes instead.

“I’ll show you how much of a finocchio I am,” Dugan says to the girl, and he’s puffed up now, grinning with one side of his mouth, _“Come va cinque lire, eh?”_

Rogers’ chair scrapes against the stone floor, loud enough that some of the men look towards them, curious. Jim looks past Dugan and sees that the other girls were looking already: hard eyes, inscrutable. “How about ten,” Rogers says, flat. 

The girl pulls free of Dugan and Jim both. She looks at the short, skinny man standing across from her, his fists pressing against his notebook, open on the table. He’s smudging his sketches: three of the prostitutes huddled together on the low bench under the window. Jim and Dugan and Dernier, in profile. Barnes, dancing, smiling - arm up over his head to twirl the girl.

Half the room’s fallen quiet and is looking at them. Rogers just stands there, chin tipped up. His face is flushed and his hand is balled up in a fist around the pencil he still holds, but he holds out the other one to the girl and gives a small, tight smile. 

Jim’s eyes dart up to Barnes, standing over Rogers’ shoulder. They lock eyes, but Barnes doesn’t say anything. He has that look again, that Jim saw by the latrines - wild-eyed, and empty all the way through.

Somehow this gambit works: the girl sidles over to Steve, looks down at him. She runs her hands through his hair, turning his head back curiously. He’s blushing like crazy now, and he doesn’t look happy, but he sets his jaw and submits to her scrutiny. She laughs. 

Dugan laughs too. “Have at her, finocchio,” he says, and Barnes lunges for him.

Rogers checks him neatly - shifting back so his bony shoulder hits Barnes right where the star sits on his costume. They both stagger forward and it’s enough to break the moment. It isn’t until Rogers is halfway up the big creaking staircase, leading the girl by the hand, that Jim realizes he’s still halfway out of his own seat, his fists clenched and shaking.

 

-

 

Rogers doesn’t come back downstairs for a long time. Barnes doesn’t come back inside at all. Jim finds him by accident, stumbling outside to piss. He goes out the kitchen door and the sound of the wind shaking through the wheat fields points his feet left, towards an outhouse he doesn’t remember is on a different continent and not theirs anymore, and is startled when a voice calls: “Steve?”

Jim stops. He can’t see anything. The faint haze of starlight above his head can’t cut through the black night. He can’t even see his own hands. “No,” he says, after a moment.

“Oh,” Barnes says. Jim turns towards the sound of his voice and then stumbles over his own feet, going down hard on the frosty ground. After that it seems only reasonable to go the rest of the way. Flat on his back, the stars look much brighter.

Somewhere close, there’s the sound of liquid sloshing against glass. “Gimme some’a that,” Jim says. 

“Think you’ve had enough,” Barnes says.

“Yep,” Jim concedes, and Barnes takes another swig from his bottle, invisible in the dark.

The ride back to base is subdued. Dernier had gone upstairs too, and Jim can smell it on him, that salt smell, sweat and sex. That harsh lavender perfume. Jim puts his head out the side of the car and thinks of gardenias, and  _ home _ \- 

He thinks of December in California. He’d been twenty-two for a little more than a month. He’d borrowed his chichi’s car to take Mika to the ocean. She’d worn a blue dress, and as they drove she’d put her hand out the window as if she could touch the fields they passed, sunlight sparkling over the bare skin of her arm. The air was sweet with garlic and warm until they got closer to Monterey, when the garlic fields gave way to strawberries and artichokes all the way across the horizon, great thistley bushes with blooming purple hearts.

He’d meant to ask her to marry him that day, but maybe it was for the best that he hadn’t.

_ “Je suis d ésolé ,”_ Dernier says. 

Jim opens his eyes. The headlights cut a white circle through the night. “What?” he asks.

“I know you are not the faggot,” Dernier tells him, and takes a hand off the wheel to pat Jim’s knee. The car jerks a little, and from the back Dugan lets out a rumbly little complaint.

“Finocchio,” Jim says, realizing.

“Oui,” Dernier says, rueful. “The girl, she did not realize. I say to her later, that one is not the faggot. So no one will think this of you.” He pats Jim’s knee again.

Jim looks over his shoulder. Barnes’ head is tipped back, face turned towards the window. All Jim can see is the line of his jaw and the faintest slice of his eyes, shadowed so even that bright blue looks black. Dugan’s in between him and Rogers, like a chaperone. 

“S’okay,” Jim mumbles, and that’s all he knows until there’s an arm around his shoulders, and a soft voice saying, “On your feet, Private.”

The Jeep is parked; they’re back at base. It’s quiet all around them, the fires gone out, the shooting stopped. Their little circle of tents is dark and silent. 

His cot is cold and hard, harder and colder than the ground had been back at the farm. Barnes goes so far as to drape Jim’s blanket over him, until Jim can shove a hand at his knees and tell him to fuck off. But he doesn’t fall asleep when Barnes obeys: stays shivering in his cot, staring mindlessly. There’s a sliver of light - not even light, really, just a softer shade of gray where the canvas flap hasn’t closed completely. Gabe in his own cot is invisible but for the light soles of his feet, sticking out from under his lump of blankets.

“Bucky, come on,” Rogers says.

“M’goin to bed,” Barnes says. He sounds muffled, already in the tent he and Rogers share. Rogers must still be outside, standing in the cold. “Go fuckin shower or something.”

“Buck, you know I didn’t -” 

“Sure,” Barnes says, “yeah sure, you didn’t.”

There’s a rustling noise, and a soft thud: it sounds like Rogers has thrown something at Barnes, who grunts faintly. “Take a look,” Rogers says.

Silence for a while. Gabe shifts on his cot, flopping over onto his back. The world rolls under Jim’s shoulders, less steady than the ships he’s taken to Italy. His stomach sugary sweet with booze. The sound of turning pages, just the barest whisper at the edge of Jim’s hearing. 

“You drew her picture,” Barnes says. “That’s -”

“Yeah,” Rogers says steadily. “I did.”

“Well,” Barnes says, very quiet. “Well, whaddayou know from girls, anyway.” 

“Not much,” Rogers says, and Jim hears the heavy flap of their tent close. 

Whatever Rogers says next is too faint for Jim to hear and he drifts a little, lost in the waves of his own drunk. He doesn’t mean to listen, and for a while doesn’t realize he is: to the faint, barely-heard sound of skin on skin, to the creak of the cot. It mixes into his own dreams, that salt smell, the frothy surface of the Monterey Bay, Mika’s hot skin on his own, sunlight on her arms. Loving her in the sunshine, in the cab of his chichi’s truck. Then Barnes groans - a soft stutter of sound - like ice in Jim’s stomach, and he opens his eyes to find himself alone and cold and so lonely he has to close his eyes again, shut them tight against the swell of feeling bubbling up in his chest. 

He hears someone crying, and in his confusion thinks it’s him, maybe. It’s not until morning - the weather turned back to shit, icy hail and them in wet socks after they tramp out to the latrines, him and Gabe eating field rations in their tent - that he realizes it was Barnes instead.

 

 


	8. Chapter 8

 

 

When they meet up with the fighter planes that will be escorting the carrier that will be dropping them in France, Gabe finds himself shaking hands with four black pilots, lieutenants, from the 99th Fighter Squadron. They’ve been flying over Cassino on recon and assault missions. The planes have a vivid red insignia; they are known as the Red Tails or the Red-Tailed Angels.

“These fighters are the best you’re gonna find,” says the corporal who drives with them to the airfield. “Don’t care if they’re red, green, or polka dotted.” Gabe pinches his mouth shut, because he’s heard that one before. “They sure know how to fly a plane. Brought down five German fighters in four minutes.”

One of the fighters, Lt. Lester, says they may have to shoot down some bombers. “But that’s our job. Don’t worry about that,” he says.

“Who’s worried?” Dum Dum grumbles.

Gabe says, “Thanks.”

Monty says, “These fellows haven’t yet earned their wings.”

“They’ll be fine,” Lester says, “If we can do it, so can they.”

Gabe looks at him in surprise, and Lester smiles at him - he’s a gentle-looking, long-lashed fellow. Later he explains, while they’re alone in the roar of the airfield, engines getting ready, and Gabe is checking the straps on his parachute. He says, “Three times as much training as the white fellas. Why? Because they wanted to prove we couldn’t do it. Only of course now we’re three times as good.” He grins again, a little slyly. “Or at least twice as good.” 

Gabe smiles back. 

Lester sighs. “‘Course, now there are some boys who say we needed three times as much training. Rather than having to take three times as long to prove ourselves.”

Gabe nods. “So it goes,” he says. 

“Anyhow. We’re the best,” Lester says, without real ego. 

“One in the eye for the krauts, I guess,” Gabe says quietly, though of course they both know the sad irony, which is of course that the krauts can’t see who’s shot them down, nor will they care afterwards. It’s not really one in the eye for the krauts; it’s one in the eye for Jim Crow, only of course they don’t say that, because as far as they are concerned the Army is Jim Crow and Jim Crow is the Army.

He can tell Lester wants to ask a whole lot of question about the passengers: between Steve and Barnes in his Captain America gear and not to mention him and Jim and then Jacques with his accent, they’re a funny sight; and too they’ve got their rubber ducks all packed up on pallets and loaded into the big bomber. It’s got to raise questions for everyone.

But one of the things the Red Tailed Angels must have learned in all that training is not to ask questions.

 

-

 

No one shoots at them during the crossing, but the landing isn’t easy. They all practiced a few times, on a safe clear airfield in England, but this time it’s night, in a countryside that’s been getting shelled since 1940 at least. They come in low and fast, and by the time they’ve all dropped out of the carrier they wind up scattered at least a hundred yards away from each other across a wet churned-up field. It stinks of cattle dung and grass. Gabe finally comes to rest fetched up against a tree, covered in mud and with one arm totally numb where he’s banged his funny bone. He has to somersault away pretty quickly when one of the stacks of decoys tries to roll up against the same tree, nearly crushing him. In bundles of ten, tied with cord, the false tanks weigh almost a thousand pounds. They have planned it so they’ll get them with a tractor later. 

When they all reconnoiter, Bucky’s holding Steve up with an arm around his shoulder. Dugan’s got a bloody nose. Monty is fine; he’s done tens of parachute drops already. Twenty-three, as he’ll inform anyone who asks. This will make it an even two dozen. He’s helping Jacques take off his rig and they are in a spirited argument that they began while still in the plane, over the fact that De Gaulle has taken over the Free French as of a few days ago. In Gabe’s view the whole problem is that the rest of the Allies don’t trust De Gaulle and if they did things would be all right. Peggy’s told him some of the Americans still deal with the Vichy government, which isn’t right. He doesn’t say anything about it this time, though, because Steve needs help.

Being Steve, he won’t say anything, but he looks like he’s in pain. He’s limping, one foot not touching the ground. Gabe goes to get him by the other arm and Steve lets him, though his shoulders are hiked up tense. Really, Bucky could carry Steve himself. Hell - back home he’d often enough picked Gabe up on the dance floor and swung him around; he’s pretty strong. He’d held Gabe up against a wall one time, just with the force of his legs, and Gabe’s wrapped around his waist.

But Steve, he doesn’t like to be held like that. He doesn’t like to have his feet up off the ground. So they take him together over the rutted ground and toward the nearby barn. It’s big and vaulted. It smells… it’s a smell Gabe can just vaguely remember, maybe from when he was a really little kid. Country smell, hay and cotton; it brings up a lingering taste in the back of his throat like sawdust. He distracts himself by switching his brain over to French and naming all of the objects he can see around him. 

Fourche  à foin. Pitchfork. 

There’s wood stacked in the corner. 

“Is it safe to start a fire?” Gabe ventures, and Jacques laughs at him. 

_“Pas ici,”_ he says, and Gabe feels his face turn hot, because of course - they’re in a hay barn. It would go up in a second. He shakes his head at himself; his daddy would be ashamed to know he raised such a city slicker. 

“We also don’t wanna get spotted,” Steve points out. He’s pale and lowering himself slowly onto a pallet. “Maybe later, when we know it’s safe.”

Morita kneels down next to Steve and is pulling off his boot, making that funny frown and grimace like he does sometimes. So is Bucky, like he’s feeling the pain Steve won’t let himself. Steve’s just got his teeth open a little, breathing tight between them. 

“Radio to Carter?” Morita says under his breath, and Gabe nods. 

“Righto,” Monty says. He’s the one who parachuted down with the radio equipment, because he could be trusted not to land on it and wreck it. They go outside and set up the flexible antenna while Dum Dum and Jacques busy themselves with the tractor: digging it out from the hay, calling over to Morita for help when it won’t start, then driving off through the dark, bumpy fields to round up all the rubber ducks that have gone astray in the drop. It’s nighttime, very dark. And it’s very, very quiet. 

 

-

 

The thing about places where there’s been bombings is it’s not just the look of them, like they saw in films back home: it’s the smell. The smell of heavy burned metal lingers in the air for a long, long time. That must be what scared away the cows, or maybe the farmer who used to live here took them away. When dawn breaks and they explore the rest of the village - what little of it is still standing - they find that most of the edibles have disappeared apart from some sausages and cheese that have plenty of mold in them. There’s also a barrel of old flour. It has some weevils or something in it. 

Gabe says, “I’m not cooking, I didn’t join the Army to cook,” which is a joke because that’s all they were taking black soldiers for, for the most part; it’s why they tried to 4-F him until he came back with a doctor’s note saying his heart was just fine, thanks, at which point they said, let’s level with you, son, you’re going to find yourself carrying trays for white officers down in Alabama. So then he and Steve had taken their shot at the artist’s outfit, and now here he is.

Jacques makes the fire, of course. He murmurs to Gabe, “Bois tordu fait feu droit.”

Gabe translates for the rest of them. “Crooked wood still makes a straight up fire.”

“I like that,” Steve says, and Bucky rolls his eyes and says, “Of course you do.” He hands Steve his tin cup of what the Army calls coffee, then gives one to Gabe. Monty still prefers tea, but it doesn’t go nearly as well with the liquor they found in dusty bottles in someone’s root cellar. Steve and Bucky add some to their coffee, making it Irish coffee, and Gabe tries it too. It’s a little strong for this early in the morning, but not unwelcome.

Morita uses more of it to wash out the cuts they’ve all gotten landing in the bracken. Gabe honestly hadn’t even noticed at the time, but they sting, and as Morita says, it would be dumb as hell for them to die of an infection now.

 

-

 

They’re waiting for Peggy and the group of French Resistance fighters she’s bringing to help them. Either the sausage Jacques added to last night’s soup had turned or they’re all nervous, because every one of them keeps jumping up with the trots all night, trekking across fields of dry cow shit to an outhouse that smells a lot worse. Cows, Gabe supposes, have relatively blameless digestive systems as compared to human beings.

It’s quiet for two days and nights. Or quiet in a relative way. By day they monitor German frequencies and track troop movement. At night they crouch in their ruined barn, made more ruined by judicious application of paint and canvas, and pray to pass unnoticed. 

There’s a stretch of water between England and France only twenty miles wide. It’d make a lot of sense to send a lot of soldiers through that twenty mile stretch, if you think about it logically. Good port on both sides, some nice roads and bridges on the French half, easy to move a whole army onto the continent from there and roll it up to Hitler’s doorstep. 

While Captain America was storming churches in Italy, massive columns of Sherman tanks have been lining up along the white cliffs of Dover. Planes and trucks and camps full of men, too. As the Allies go, so too the Germans: pas de Calais is bristling with Nazi garrisons, staring patiently across the Channel, daring the Brits to make the first move, to fail here as they have at Dieppe, as they have failed at other beaches along northern France. 

But that’s not their job. It’s not why they’ve been dropped into one of the most heavily fortified stretches of Europe. They’ve got the hard part, Captain America and his commandos. Sabotage isn’t as easy a detail as those yokels babysitting an army of rubber tanks over in Dover.

Gabe dozes off toward morning on the second night after their landing. It’s a dry kind of sleep, as uncomfortable and scratchy as the hay he lies on. Dry everywhere: dry on his back where he’s lying next to Jacques, all of them in a pile because even in April it’s fairly cool at night. Dry in his throat. Dry and sandy behind his eyes. His head buzzes with dehydration from the runs and with the sifting stuff of fatigue, so that at first he thinks the buzz might be merely the stuff in his brain roiling around.

But it gets louder. 

Louder, this humming sort of clicking sound, and then he hears Morita jump up and shout something. Jacques jerks upright, too, snorting and smacking his way out of sleep. Dum Dum bellows; Morita has, only maybe by accident, stepped on him. 

Bucky’s leapt up too, grabbing his gun, and Steve’s sitting upright and peering wildly around. It’s not even dawn. It’s all gray and fuzzy, all around them.

“Calmez, calmez!” Jacques shouts at last, and they stop. Steve hold up a hand and squints. Gabe freezes. He’s on his knees, he realizes, almost as if in prayer.

_“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”_ he asks. 

_“C’est pas les avions,”_ Jacques explains. He motions, a calming gesture. He knows from explosions, Gabe guesses, and now that he listens more closely, he can tell - yeah, it’s not bombs or shells or strafing they hear outside. 

“Les cigales,” Jacques says.

“It’s crickets,” Gabe says. “Just crickets.” 

Morita has actually jammed his hat into his mouth, and one of the ear flaps dangles like he’s a dog that’s bitten down on a rabbit. He looks funny, but he also looks scared. Finally, he takes the hat out and says, “They don’t sound like that in California.”

Bucky’s shaking his head, and so is Steve. Steve says, “Well, we don’t have them at all in New York.” They’re making excuses for getting so spooked, Gabe guesses; all of them are doing that. Gabe thinks to himself, and he is ashamed by this - to be relieved that even those who’ve seen real infantry combat, like Morita and Bucky, seem frightened. It’s not just him. 

It’s funny. Somewhere, somehow, he can remember hearing this noise before. Crickets in summer making noise in the fields when his daddy was coming home, a long time ago, before they came up North.

Monty clears his throat and says, “Quite a ruckus.” He has this way of speaking, as if by pronouncing the oddness they encounter in his distinct way, he can somehow take ownership of it and make it less of a disaster. He talks about the Blitz like that: as if he’s proud of it, which he is, really, or rather he’s proud of being able to describe it as if it’s nothing.

They’re all relaxing by this point, and then someone farts loudly and they all break up laughing. Nervous laughter. 

“Whew,” Dum Dum says. “I’m going to get some air.”

“Crickets, huh?” Bucky says, giving Steve a hand up off the straw. “Fucking crickets.”

The crickets have scared them all awake, so they go outside to eat breakfast, which is K-rations until they move on to their next base of operations. Gabe crumbles his crackers into a cup of tea he’s mixed with the powdered milk, copying from Monty. The tea Monty brought is better than the Army coffee and Dugan and Bucky are too stubborn to drink it, but Gabe has always been a flexible sort. 

Gabe remembers where he’s heard the word “cigale” before. The things are quieter now, not much worse than 125th Street when you stumble out onto it after the bars have all closed. Their ruckus seems to have been confined to dawn, maybe aggravated by the dew. As mist rises off the grass, coaxed upwards by the sun, the noise is quieting down. Later they’ll find it tapers off into the afternoon as the temperature grows too warm for them, and begins again at dusk and near daybreak.

_“La cigale et la fourmi,”_ Gabe says now. 

“Ah ouai,” says Jacques, nodding thoughtfully. He blows on his tea and watches the fields, maybe thinking of his own farm and the harvest there.

“We read it in school,” Gabe explains to the others. “The grasshopper who sang all summer. Jean de la Fontaine. Aesop’s fables. You know, he got the story from an African. Anyway,” he tells Bucky, who’s looking interested. “The grasshopper - ”

“I thought it was a cricket,” says Dugan, who gives everyone a hard time like this.

Gabe shrugs.

“Anyway?” Steve says, curious now.

“The grasshopper sang all summer,” Gabe says, “And the ant worked, and then all the grasshoppers died when winter came.”

_“C’est presque vrai,”_ Jacques says. _“Quelques esp è ces de cigales ne se reveillent que chaque douzaine d’ann é es… c’est pour qu’ils soient si nombreuses que les predateurs ne peuvent pas les manger.”_

“I think I got that,” Steve says.

“I didn’t,” Morita mutters. He’s trying to smooth his hat back into shape. Amusingly, Dum Dum is doing something similar with his own.

“The strategy,” Monty translates airily, loosely, “is to fling large numbers of themselves at the enemy every so often, knowing that the enemy can only eat a certain number of them, and the rest will make it out.” He adds, “They sing to draw attention. They do it on purpose."

“Huh,” Bucky says. He’s exchanging a look with Morita behind Steve’s back. Steve, meanwhile, is staring down into his coffee, jaw tight; and then he looks up and smiles.

 

-

 

Peggy arrives just after moonrise on the third night, towing four ragged looking members of the French Resistance - three men and one woman. They shake hands with Bucky, stoic in his Captain America costume, and then with Jacques. They’ve blocked up the basement of a nearby farmhouse to take this meeting, to keep the faint light of a gas lamp from showing to any Germans passing by. There are two ways out of the place but they’re all itchy. It’s too easy to think about how it could turn into a shooting gallery, with them on the losing side.

They have Jim and Dum Dum on the perimeter, Steve upstairs peering out the windows. Every once in awhile Gabe can hear him thumping that twisted ankle across the bare wood floor. He’s never been what you’d call graceful, and though Jim assured them it would heal in a few days Steve hasn’t done much to speed the process.

Gabe is downstairs with Bucky and Peggy and Jacques and the French - ostensibly keeping guard at the cellar door, but mostly playing dumb, so they don’t know Cap has another French-speaker in his unit. It grates on him, though, his part. He stares blank and uncomprehending when one of them men says something uncomplimentary about Cap’s suit.

He stays blank while they pull out a map with markings all over it. German postings. Where the roads have been mined. There are scribbles all over the sides of it, and the paper’s much worn. Gabe wonders what their plan will be if they’re caught; whether they’d have time to burn the map. Jacques has told him that for the most part the Germans do not kill the French they capture unless they’re caught with a radio. Mostly they send them to the camps. They’d rather have workers than bodies; Jacques had escaped from one camp and been caught trying at two more before he’d wound up in Kreischberg. 

Calais-Nord is the old town, encircled by canals flowing fast from the winter rains. There’s not a lot left of the town proper, which was bombed to hell and back by the Brits back in ‘40, just a lot of Germans who have taken up occupation in the rubble, filling themselves into the nooks and crannies like cockroaches. It’s the canals that they’re after, or rather the bridges running across them. 

“The Germans run four trains a week from here,” says one of the men, Alain, stabbing his finger down at the map where a trainyard is sketched out. “They bring the concrete and the mines through our city, for their coastal defenses. Twice, we’ve tried to blow the terminal, but there are many collaborators.” He spits on the ground. 

They know all of this, inside and out. Well enough that Captain America can settle back and speak confidently, even if Gabe knows Bucky has no idea what Alain actually said.

“This is our target,” he says, and taps the map in front of them, where one canal takes a long bend around the western wall of Calais-Nord and collides with another. “We’ll take your men and move on it tomorrow night.” 

It’s three klicks or so from the hated trainyard, and when Jacques translates this the Frenchmen look at Captain America with confusion, and then look to Peggy.

“Is he as stupid as he looks?” asks one of the other men, whose name is Louis. “What the hell good would blowing up this bridge do? It won’t stop the Nazis and their damn trains.” 

Peggy smiles. She gleams even through the haze of cigarettes, her mouth deep red, perfect even though her boots and clothes are scuffed with travel. It’s a nice bit of theater, Gabe thinks, even as he aches a little just to see her. She lets Captain America speak again, and then tells them in French what he’s saying.

“Tell your soldiers that the plan is to blow the north bridge. Let someone pass along the word to the Germans. When they gather up here to find Captain America,” and Peggy taps the map again, looking in each of their eyes, “ _ our _ men will be here, under the bridge above the trainyard, planting explosives. Voila - no more trains. No more mines. No more bunkers.”

The French turn their faces down towards the map in silent contemplation.  _ Thump _ goes Steve across the floor upstairs,  _ thump thump _ . Only Bucky looks up.

“Well done,” says Alain, and reaches out to shake Captain America’s hand. “It’s a good plan.”

The attack is set for the following night. Peggy goes with them; not even a war can spare them from propriety. She lingers just for a moment, her hands folded in front of her - near enough that Gabe can smell the last traces of perfume, hear the soft sound of her breath.

At the door, Alain turns to Jacques and leans in to speak. His compatriots have vanished into the darkness and it’s only the two of them and Gabe. Alain glances towards him regardless, and Gabe lets his eyes wander, go wide and vacant. Nobody here but us chickens. 

“So your army will invade at pas de Calais,” Alain says, “this is where you will come to free us from the Nazis.”

Jacques lays a heavy hand on Alain’s shoulder. He looks this way and that, like he’s not supposed to tell. “They’re massing a force like you’ve never seen,” he says, low. “There will not be a German left alive in France.”

“You don’t mind lying to your people?” Gabe asks, once they’re alone, standing together in the door of the farmhouse.  _ Thump  _ comes from behind them, and they turn to see Steve making his grim, slow way down the stairs, Bucky’s rifle under his arm.

Jacques laughs. “It’s not a lie,” he says. “It’s my most fervent hope.”

“But we won’t be landing at pas de Calais,” Gabe says, even though Jacques knows this as well as he does - knows the dates that have been fixed, the scant months they have to wreak as much havoc as they can before the Channel fills with soldiers. To keep the Nazi’s eyes fixed on Calais, and not on Normandy. 

Jacques shrugs. “When France free at least and every German dead - they won’t mind either.”

 

-

 

It rains all day and into the evening. They spend the gray hours preparing: Jacques putting together his bombs; Dugan checking and rechecking their equipment; Monty diligently stitching patches onto their uniform jackets, the red pentagram of the First United States Army Group, which is just as imaginary as their rubber tanks; Jim hunched over the radio, listening intently to every dot and dash to see if their operation has been made. There isn’t much for Gabe to do, so he climbs into the hayloft with Bucky and they sleep through most of the afternoon. He’s almost stopped smelling the hay by now, so when he dreams he gets tangled up in the smell of Bucky’s warm, broad body next to his, the memories fresher than he would have thought, with all the years between that wild summer and now.

When he wakes up Bucky is staring blankly up at the ceiling, one hand tucked behind his head and the other around Steve, who’s asleep on his chest. He shifts when he sees that Gabe is awake, and for a long moment they look at each other without speaking.

 

 

How strange a thing, Gabe thinks, still lost somewhere in misty dreams: to travel the world and find old friends at the other side. He’d had never once thought of being a soldier until he had, until the need to be counted had consumed him. Would it have been easier if the war had taken him the way it had eagerly taken Bucky - conscription, boot camp, infantry, killing? To be just one more body thrown into the grinder? Or is it easier to sing and call the enemy down upon them? 

There’s a thump on the ladder. Dum Dum’s bowler precedes him, peering up the rim of the loft. “Cap?” he asks.

Steve rubs his face fitfully against Bucky’s chest. His face is flushed, hot enough that he leaves little damp marks on Bucky’s shirt. “Yeah,” he says. “Be there in a second.”

 

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

 

When they arrive at the rendezvous Louis is holding the reins of a horse, dark brown without a speck of white on it, tossing its head impatiently. It’s bigger than Gabe thought horses would be, and Captain America looks about as unsettled as he had when they’d met a bear. There’s a brief scuffle over who has to deal with it, which ends with Jim being nominated for having grown up on a farm, even though he spits at them, “Not all farms come with horses,” as he takes the reins from Louis.

Gabe and Steve climb into the cart with the radio equipment and sit as far away from the horse as possible. There’s only two big damn wheels on the thing, almost as high as Steve himself is, so when the horse starts trotting they’re both pitched backwards by gravity.

Captain America laughs out loud, his teeth white in the gloomy darkness. He and Monty wave to them, as if they’re off on a hay ride. Peggy doesn’t crack a smile, standing grim faced and ready, hands braced on her Tommy gun. 

They’ve timed the operation at the apogee of the German patrols, when the units that roam through what used to be villages and farms will be at their furthest points. The wagon creaks louder than the horse’s heavy footfalls on the worn path. Ten minutes behind and half a klick north of their position, Captain America, Peggy and Monty will lead a group of twenty or so Resistance fighters towards the dummy target. No word if the Germans have bitten on the false operation, so Gabe’s job - Jim’s job, if he weren’t driving the horse - is to make sure they do now.

They’ve got short range radios, in case of emergency. Jacques and Dugan are silent, but Bucky’s left the transmitter in his helmet open, ready for instruction. It won’t alert the Germans unless he’s transmitting and in the middle of a fire fight they’ll have other things to be concerned about.

They have a circuitous route to keep the Germans from triangulating their position, winding around the old town and its canal. Steve braves proximity to the horse to hook his elbow on Jim’s bench and navigate, but the last three days have given them a pretty clear map of where the Germans will be at any point in time. 

“Bucky doing okay?” Gabe asks him once, laying off the radio as Jim does something up front that makes the horse thunder down the dark roads - according to what the Germans are hearing, Captain America is about five klicks from the target, coming up from the south. If Bucky is where he should be, they’re already huddled up within sight of the bridge into Calais-Nord, in a grand stone building that had only half escaped being bombed.

Steve looks at him, confused. “Sure he is,” he answers. “Why wouldn’t he be?”

Like he knew they were talking about him, the walkie talkie crackles. _"Bereit,"_ Bucky says. _“Warten auf den Zug.”_

“Tell him we need a few more minutes,” Steve says. They’ve overheard a few lazy radio operators in the last few days sending casual messages to their buddies, and are operating under the assumption that German transmissions in an occupied territory will be inherently less suspicious than ones in English.

_“Hab Geduld,”_ Gabe says, but he hears it too: the grinding of tires on the road. Steve lunges up and taps Jim’s shoulder, points off the road. Jim obeys without question. They have just enough time to get themselves hidden in a hole big enough to fit the damn horse into, torn in the side of someone’s house. Then the Nazis come into view. 

It sounds for a moment like morning rush hour in the city: the hush of dozens of people not speaking, not thinking, massing as one. They step as one too, or at least it sounds like it: that steady metronome.

“More of ‘em than I’d thought there’d be,” Jim says after a moment, as they watch the parade pass by. Steve’s jaw clenches. He doesn’t say anything, but it’s true: there are a lot more than they were expecting. The Nazis have sent an entire company after Captain America - six trucks, maybe as many as a hundred fifty infantry. Gabe tries to count, but they can’t see how deep the column goes, and after a moment it feels pointless.

“Should we abort?” Gabe asks. It’s barely more than a whisper. “Steve? Should we abort?”

Steve inhales sharply - and then starts coughing, muffling it into his gloved hands. The cold does awful things for his asthma. “No,” he gasps, and fumbles in his pocket for one of his pills. “No, we stick to the plan. If it starts going south, we’ll blow the radio.”

_“Kampfgruppe auf dem Weg,”_ Gabe says, as quiet as he can. _“Achtgeben.”_

If Bucky can hear the shake in Gabe’s voice, he gives no sign, no answer. The column passes them, and the sound of Nazi boots fades into quiet, softer than the monotonous drone of those few early, hopeful crickets, singing into the night.

“Tell Dernier to light it up,” Steve says, between his teeth.

Dernier must have been waiting with his thumb on the trigger, because it’s only a few seconds between the radioed order and the flash of his explosives, bright enough to light up the whole sky. Then a crack of sound, following close behind like thunder. Smoke rolls out from beyond the treeline, acrid, thick enough that it blocks out the lights of Calais-Nord and the German garrisons beyond.

But at the edges of the smoke, the air feels abruptly heavier, sweeter - something in it wet and living. The water of the canal, Gabe thinks, thrown into the sky. Pouring thick and clotted across the trainyard, carrying with it thousands of pounds of debris that had been the bridge. 

Down the road the Nazis start yelling - and then screaming.

The quickest route between the north bridge and the trainyard is straight through. No roads go between, just muddy, abandoned farmland, and in this they bet their money on human error and come up aces: in the first moment of confusion the Nazi company rushes instinctively towards the explosion, and runs straight into a heavily mined field. 

From the other side of the road, Captain America and the Resistance have broken cover, lobbing Stark’s grenades over hedges and against the Nazis’ unprotected flank. Gabe, Steve, and Jim are too far away to see, but they can hear Bucky giving terse commands over the shortwave radio. They’ve got the Germans bottlenecked: forward, onto the bridge they think Captain America is about to blow, or back the way they came. 

“Move half your men back onto the road, box them in,” Steve says into the walkie talkie, and a moment later they hear Bucky bark out the order, some combination of French and gestures that must get the point across, because through their binoculars they see muzzles flash, and hear the  _ pop-pop-pop _ of Peggy’s Tommy gun.

Next to him, Steve’s hand fists around Gabe’s sleeve, hard enough to hurt. When Gabe looks over he’s got his binoculars pointed towards the sky, trying to see through the smoke above their head. “Do you hear that?” he asks, urgently.

Gabe listens with every muscle in his body, staring blank and straining. Jim glances over his shoulder nervously at them, his attention on the road and the battle, in case any Germans come hurtling their way. “What?” he asks. “What is it?”

Gabe breaks away from him, goes running, lurching back towards the radio. He hits the edge of the cart stomach first in his haste and flips forward, almost clipping his chin on the belly of it. The horse startles, dancing in its harness, but Gabe barely notices. He’s jamming the headset over his ears with one hand as his other twists the knob. “The British frequency,” he shouts at Jim, “what is it, what do they use?”

He finds it just in time to hear a plummy, cheerful voice say, “There goes the cookie! Bombs away!”

“Take cover!” Gabe screams.

“What?” he hears Bucky say through the walkie talkie in Steve’s hand, and then, “ _ fuck _ , the RAF, get everyone -”

There’s a brief moment of echoing silence as their men cease fire and run like their lives depend on it, because they do, and in those few seconds it’s quiet enough that Gabe actually hears the bombs whistle as they fall through the sky.

The impact hits him around the middle, and for a moment he’s not sure if it’s the shockwave or just the shock of noise but he feels it like a physical thing, like a fist against his chest that flings him out of the cart and onto the ground. The horse screams, and Gabe does the only thing he can: he covers his head with his arms and prays.

The first thing he’s aware of is Jim grabbing at him, rolling him over and slapping him roughly. Gabe spits dirt and grit out of his mouth, shoves at Jim’s hands, “I’m alright, I’m alright,” he says, because he is, he  _ is _ \- he’s alright, he’s alive.

“On your feet,” Jim says tightly. “They’ll need our help if they made it through that.”

“Bucky!” Steve’s shouting into the walkie talkie. “Bucky, come in!”

Gabe stumbles as they clear the farmhouse, dizzy: the land around them has been turned into the moon. Cratered and pockmarked, and littered here and there with bodies. Limbs, mostly. A helmet, a boot. One body intact, sprawled at the base of their shelter like he’d been thrown there. He could be sleeping but for the look on his face. 

Gabe’s been marinating in that heavy, scorched-metal stink for four days and he’d almost stopped noticing it at all. If the smell of bombing hadn’t faded, the smell of death - of liquified insides, of blood and shit - had.

He turns and vomits into the burnt skeleton of a hedge, and then totters after Jim and Steve.

They find Louis north of the crater that had hit the Germans, or most of him. The woman who had come to the farmhouse, Genevieve, is just beyond. Then nothing for the hundred yards between her and the canal until they look downstream and see shadowed figures pulling themselves out of the water, fetched up against the ruin of the northern bridge.

And there, swimming awkwardly through the water, is Peggy - one arm around the limp, unresisting form of Captain America, Monty trailing close behind them.

Gabe gets there first, plowing into the water. Waist deep before they reach him, and there’s a moment where he can only press his hands to Peggy’s hair, and she to his face, both of them shuddering for breath. She gives over Bucky’s body, and between Gabe and Monty they tow him back to shore, to Steve. 

“Medic!” Gabe shouts as they stumble onto the sand, but Jim barely looks up, hunched over Alain’s prone body.

“I need help!” he snaps, and it’s Peggy who goes, dripping and spraying water. In the exchange of their hands - Jim lifting up as Peggy braces her weight against the makeshift bandage of Jim’s own coat - Gabe sees the slippery gray slide of intestines, slithering out of Alain’s body.

“Bucky, Bucky,” Steve’s calling, and it’s the metal click of Bucky’s helmet being undone that hooks Gabe back to attention. Bucky’s still half in the water, and Gabe scoops handfuls of it up to pour over him, to wash away the silt and the blood and find out what’s underneath.

Monty’s sitting with his hands in his lap. He’s staring up into the sky, but it’s too dark to see the contrails of the RAF overhead. “He shielded us,” Monty says. His tone is dull, worn through. There’s a deep cut on the side of his head and his face is a mask of gore. “Carter and me. He took the brunt of the blast as we were knocked into the water.”

“He’s breathing,” Steve says, and Gabe feels cloth, the stiff edges of the plates sewn into the fabric, and then a wide gash. He puts his hands into it - and goes weak all over when there’s only a sluggish flow of blood instead of the hot spray he’d been terrified of finding.

He nods, struck dumb, sagging back against the scrubby sand. He looks up, and over Alain’s body and Jim’s shoulders, he meets Peggy’s eyes. He nods again and sees her mouth go soft and liquid before she turns back to her task.

The bridge is burning. The smell of it is sharp and crackling. It makes the soldiers around him hazy and insubstantial, like shambling ghosts as they collect their dead and wounded. It turns the rippling surface of the canal into a shuddering blaze.

Gabe gets unsteadily to his feet. Captain America’s shield is lapping gently against the shore, gleaming in the firelight. There’s a little pool of water in the bowl of it, and when Gabe picks it up he can see his own face in it, ashen and stunned.

 

-

 

In the end, Gabe and a woman named Simone retrace their footsteps back to the tumble-down farmhouse to retrieve the horse and cart. They load Alain and Bucky and Monty and the three wounded French fighters into it, and the rest of them walk alongside. There were six of them killed.

They detour carefully past the crater full of dead Germans, and the cart leaves them briefly behind as they stare down into it. 

“A good start,” Jacques says, and shakes a heavy head.

They retreat to a small, walled off town some distance from Calais-Nord. They’d known there were still pockets of civilians, dotted here and there throughout northern France, clinging grimly to life despite the bombings, despite the occupation. The windows are blacked out; the women at the home seem unsurprised by their condition. One woman, gray-haired and weathered, directs the others to help them bring in the wounded while her - daughters? Gabe wonders, stepdaughters? - begin boiling water and laying out bandages they’ve rolled. Gabe recalls the clean neat reams of bandages advertised by the Red Cross back home. These are rough cotton, stained but sanitary.

Steve and Peggy quickly stake out the exits and establish the safety of the house - Peggy communicating with the women and translating the parts Steve doesn’t understand. Gabe helps Jacques unload the wounded, whom they have to set on pallets on the floor of the kitchen. They put Alain on the table, high up near the gas light. Jim barks orders, which is something Gabe has never seen him do before. They have with them dried blood plasma kits, and Gabe and Dugan start following instructions to add water to the kits. 

It’s like watching a miracle - a bloody, dirty miracle. There’s copious sprinkling of sulfa into all the wounds, even onto Monty’s flinching face. Jim works first and foremost on Alain, lying on the table. He looks gray, as gray as his guts. His breathing comes shallow and makes a humming sound like a broken accordion. But when they start the plasma it’s amazing how quickly he seems to come alive again, even though they leave the gut wound open. There he is, this whole person, alive, with slimy shininess visible through partly-sutured skin. The powdered sulfa has sunk away into nothing in the wound, like salt on snow.

Steve has bent over to do the same for Bucky’s wound, sprinkling sulfa in it, but that’s about all he can do. Jim’s right to care for Alain first, of course he is. Bucky’s breathing. Gabe and Steve remove his clothes, checking him over for more wounds, but it’s mostly that one gash over his ribs. Jim sutures it only after he’s finished with Alain, then moves on to Monty, who looks better once he’s cleaned up but says he’s having trouble seeing out of his left eye. It’s one of those things that might heal or might not, the soft muscles that control the eye’s focus. 

When the initial flurry is over they all sag. The air feels suddenly colder. Gabe becomes aware, with peculiar shame, that they have tracked mud and blood and dirt into these women’s home. They are grim-faced but helpful, matter-of-fact. Still, Gabe falls in next to Dum Dum, who has finished lugging the heavy cauldrons of water in from the pump outside and begun sweeping debris off the floor. 

He listens to Peggy lean over and speak to one of the wounded Frenchmen, who stares at her blankly as she asks him the names of his comrades and tells him that they have died. One of the men is crying. One of the women drops to her knees next to him and pulls him up into her lap. His whole body is shaking. He’s making sounds that echo in the quiet kitchen. 

Words, condolences in French, pinch themselves off newly budded in Gabe’s throat.

They haven’t given any morphine to Bucky, hoping he’ll wake up without it. The slice on his side was too shallow to stitch. Shrapnel must have slid between two of the plates in the armor. It’s the head wound that worries Jim more, that he pushed Bucky’s hair aside to show them: a swelling over his ear. Getting knocked out isn’t like in comic books, when the hero jumps right back up after a brief nap. The longer he’s out, the worse it could be.

At last Dum Dum sets himself to making them all coffee, even Monty, who finds refuge in murmuring faintly about the poor quality. It doesn’t help Gabe much; he feels itchy and aching all over. His ears are ringing from the bombs and he thinks about telling Jim about it, but there doesn’t seem like much point. They’re all probably feeling the same way.

Dum Dum gives Gabe a cup of coffee, and sets a hand on his shoulder, squeezing fitfully. The mug is thick enough Gabe can barely feel the heat of it, or maybe he’s numb all over as well as half deafened. He smiles at the thought of it, wryly - but when he lifts the coffee up to drink he can see his own face in its oily surface, and flames behind it, and nothing’s that funny anymore.

Steve and Peggy have withdrawn to higher ground upstairs. Gabe joins them, grabbing two extra cups so he’ll have a pretext for interrupting. He’s also got to ask what message he and Jim will send on the radio in an hour when they check in.

“... may not be my fault, but it’s my responsibility,” Steve is saying when Gabe knocks on the thin door. 

“Permission to enter?”

“Come in,” Peggy says, dispensing with formalities. Gabe sets the coffees down on the trestle table in one corner and stands back from them.

“What we’ll need to do,” she continues quietly, “is try to find a way to transport them to a surgical facility. Assuming we do, it’s quite likely they'll fall into German hands.”

“We probably all will,” Steve says. He turns to Gabe. His mouth is very tight. “We can’t radio out just yet. We’re pretty sure the Krauts will be listening. And anyhow, they’ll know the mission succeeded.” He gestures at the window, towards the billows of thick black smoke they can’t see through the blackout curtains.

“Right,” Gabe says. “I’ll tell Jim.”

“Thank you,” Steve says, and hesitates. “How are the men downstairs?”

“The same,” Gabe says. “Nicolas - he probably won’t lose his foot, Jim says. But he says he can’t treat Alain any more than he has.”

They both nod; they know this. 

“Right,” Peggy says at last, touching Steve on the back of his hand. He stiffens a little, his natural instinct being to withdraw from concern rather than lean toward it. Then he sighs, tucks chin to chest, and reaches over for his coffee.

He cradles it in two hands, like it’s soup. It’s how he drank coffee at their favorite cafe, a Turkish joint in the West Village near the automat that Mabel May had once gone to spend late Sunday afternoons. This was of course before the Mayor came down on places like that. Gabe had begun to meet up with Steve once Bucky had been sent to learn how to be a soldier, and they’d sit and drink coffee that was textured like molasses and very bitter. 

He and Steve both drank it out of pride, maybe, or to feel sophisticated. Neither of them really liked it, he figured; as for Bucky, he had used to add as much sugar to his coffee as he could pour, though that came to seem in bad taste after America joined the war. The owners were Jews and didn’t mind serving Gabe, and it was dark and small and dusty and served pastries that all tasted the same, with a texture like wet newspaper. 

Now he lifts his cup to his mouth and sees Steve do the same, and it’s weak Army powdered stuff, no better than the coffee his mama drank back home made of grain; and they look at each other silently. Gabe knows they’re both thinking about the Turkish place and the Turkish coffee and how it wouldn’t taste so bad right about now.

Gabe fills them in on what the French think he didn’t hear them saying, which is mostly that they’re running low on food and can’t think of what to give these Americans. 

“They were talking about going back to try and find their friends.” He hesitates. “But then they said no. The Germans, they… they said they’re… well-organized about the dead.” He had asked Monty what this meant, in an undertone, and Monty had told him that they stacked up their dead in neat rows. He said they even did it in Africa when they were retreating, which on account of the heat caused some problems.

Peggy nods. Steve rubs a hand over his mouth and then lets it drop.

“Hard feelings?” Steve says. “Because I wouldn’t blame ‘em.”

Gabe pauses again. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. No one’s said anything about giving us over to the Germans.”

There’s a stretch of silence that follows that. Through the crack in the door he can hear the murmur of conversation, too soft for him to make out the words or language. But maybe it’s just his ears.

“Well,” Peggy says. She runs a hand over the front of her trousers, which are in shreds, stuck to her legs by blood. “I had better clean myself up.”

“I have an extra pair,” Gabe offers. “And Dum Dum can sew this one up.”

“I know how to sew, Jones,” she informs him, and since it’s just the three of them she can smile when she says it. It looks painful on her face, which is still smudged with silt from the river water, but it’s enough that he tries to smile back.

“Sure you do,” Gabe says, “but let the poor guy feel useful.”

Steve snorts, but he doesn’t try and defend Dum Dum. Doesn’t seem too much in the mood for talking anymore. He sets his cup of coffee down, hardly drunk, and peers out through the blackout curtains. There’s blood smeared on his sleeve, on the front of his shirt where Bucky’s head had rested. 

“Now, then,” Peggy says. “Where can I get cleaned up?”

“There’s a pump outside,” Gabe says. 

Steve has turned away and is pacing the room, hands stuffed in his pockets, head down in thought. 

 

-

 

Outside the air is still gray. The pump is set just inside a little dim shed dedicated to stacked firewood. It’s rusty and surrounded by a circle of water that still hasn’t run off through the straw. It squeaks when Peggy cranks it to life, then gurgles as water begins to flow. Gabe stands at the door, keeping guard for her. Over the burble of water, he hears her sigh. When he looks inside through the striping light that falls through cracks in the roof, he can see that she’s carefully peeling shreds of fabric out of deep scratches in her legs, like crosshatch marks. He cranes his neck outside and sees nothing and no one nearby. Even the wildlife he’s starting to get used to seems scared silent by the bombs: only the crickets keep ticking. 

Wet hay crackles underfoot as he approaches. She doesn’t look up. Peggy, Gabe realized long ago, spends much of her time lifting her chin and squaring her shoulders, and there are times she doesn’t want to. 

She’s left the pump cranked open, water flowing and pooling at her feet. Her socks are neatly in her boots, at some remove from the water. She’s stripped down below the waist to just her undergarments, which are a pair of men’s shorts. He crouches in the wet straw and cups his hands under the pump, drips water over her skin. It smears blood that just wells up again, fresher and brighter; and she tips her head back, her mouth open as she breathes out. 

He passes his hand over a wound, testing, and she lets out a sigh, a sigh as if what has to be cold stinging pain is in fact relief. As if she’s earned the hurt.

“Did you know them well?” he asks.

“No,” Peggy says, and opens her eyes to look down at him. “No, I never know any of them very well.”

He’s never asked - can never ask - how many times she’s done this. How long she’s been doing this. She’s let details slip: purposefully, because she only ever does things purposefully. She’d never have survived this long if she couldn’t keep secrets. Among the Germans, with the Maquis. Their own people, too - as much as anyone else.

She fumbles beside her to shut off the flow of the pump. It creaks to a slow drip. Gabe pulls cotton bandages out of his pockets, starts wrapping them around the worst of the cuts on her leg. One of them won’t stop bleeding now that it’s been opened. He presses on it with the heel of his hand and feels her pulse pounding through her, faster than he would have thought.

 

 

She touches his face. Her fingers are chilled through with cold, and trembling faintly. He looks up and meets her eyes. “Are you alright?” she asks, hushed.

He turns his cheek into her palm and closes his eyes. “You haven’t seen anything like that before, have you,” she says. He shakes his head. Because it hadn’t been like that in Italy, besides those few heartstopping minutes where they’d been pinned on the hillside, bullets hammering into the earth beside him, half convinced Steve would have them in a ditch before they could get to the crater to lay the tank trap, smearing mud all over Steve’s face to hide them while they waited for Captain America to catch shells. In Italy, the bombs had fallen far away.

“Just been lucky,” he says, and kisses her thigh.

She takes a breath and covers his hand with hers on her leg. His eyes fly open, and dart towards the half-open door. He stays still while she trails that hand up his arm and shoulder, cupping the back of his skull. Her hands are callused. The rasp over the sensitive skin on the back of his neck makes him shiver, and once he starts he’s shivering all over.

Peggy strokes her thumb over his cheekbone, her mouth twisting. “Don’t say it,” he warns, and kisses her again. 

“I would never,” she says, and gasps as he licks drops of water off her skin. It’s the faintest, barest sound. Under his fingers, restlessly stroking over her bandages, he can feel her heartbeat.

“It’s what I wanted,” he says, and lets her reel him closer, guide him: pressing a kiss where the fabric of her shorts come together. Stays there for a moment, open mouthed, breathing her in. River water and silt, oily smoke, and under that the faint salty smell of her. Her hips tilt forward, toward the heated air of his mouth, and when he looks up her jaw is clenched. Pained looking.

“It’s only going to get worse,” she manages, when she can - she’s shivering now too, even though her hands on his head are steady, controlled.

“I know,” he answers, and puts his tongue out, licks along the seam of her shorts, rubs against the little nub of her he can barely feel through the cloth. “But I had a lot of doors slammed in my face just to get here.”

“I know the feeling,” she gasps, and finds the edges of his smile with her thumbs. 

There’s no answer to that, not in words. Gabe could give her aphorisms in four languages, if he chose, about valor and  _ amour de patrie _ . He could quote Cyrano de Bergerac’s speech to his Gascognes, but he doesn’t. These are things he’s read in water-stained books from the Howard College library, and the words were easily absorbed. Life doesn’t move in the same way, with the flick of pages turning over. It’s wood that shifts on a heavy, precariously stacked pile. Old bark that cracks and flakes.

“Keep going,” she says, and her voice is steady, so he does. They peel her shorts off together, down past her knees. Just far enough to let him in. She puts her hands on his shoulders, and he takes the weight easily, which feels strange to him even now - like he’s wearing armor over the body he used to have, layered with muscle and hard use instead of dancing and drink. He licks her slowly, like they have all the time in the world, letting themselves pretend for just a moment that they do. Keeping his tongue flat and soft, drawing her up onto her toes at the heat of it.

He’s cold wherever she’s not touching him; his knees sunk into the muddy straw, sweat cooling on the back of his neck. But with his eyes closed, his throat tilted up and open, buried between her legs, the whole world has fallen away: quiet, at last.

She pulls him up onto his feet, and they rearrange, her shoulders pressed up against the wall. He still has the condoms they all were issued, but they’re inside with the rest of his gear, so instead what they do is this: she stands with her thighs squeezed together and he slips between them, sliding the full length of his cock against her wet cunt. She gasps, and shudders hard, her fingers digging into his arms, so he does it again and again, her hips angled down so he’s rubbing up against her clit. They’re pressed against each other everywhere they can now, his face buried in her hair, her mouth against his neck, hips moving together, her breasts soft and heavy against his chest. When she comes she’s silent, as she has to be, as both of them have to be: her whole body seizes up tight and shakes, and shakes, and shakes. He’d slowed down to give her a moment, but then her hips shift just so and it feels like he’s been kissed by the wet lips of her cunt and then he’s gone over too, startled by it.

They kiss for a while afterwards, breathing hard into the air that’s humid between them and chill everywhere else. They wash themselves with the dribble of water still coming from the pump, and he gives her the spare pair of pants that he’d thought to grab even if he hadn’t thought of condoms. 

Peggy puts a hand on his wrist, as he turns to look through the crack in the door, make sure they’re still alone. “I would never say it,” she says, very seriously, and he has to cast back for what she’s talking about.

There’s a flush creeping up her neck, or lingering. He traces it with a thumb, and says, “This is what I signed up for.”

She bites her lip. “My mother tried to teach me to be soft - weak, you know,” she says. “I suppose in some aspects she succeeded.”

“It’s not weak to care about people, Peg,” he says, even though in her line of work it is, and by the look on her face when she meets his eyes she knows it, better than he ever could.

“I suppose some people can’t keep from caring,” she says thoughtfully. “You and Steve, both of you.”

“You said yes,” Gabe says, “when he decided we had to go after Bucky.”

“I wouldn’t have done so on my own,” she says softly.

He glances down at her legs, the damage bandaged and hidden away. “Let’s go inside,” he says, because he lets her keep her secrets, even the lies she only tells herself. She keeps all of his, after all.

Back in London, Peggy had arranged for a room one evening, cautious, as always, but he doesn’t remember the caution. He remembers the color of her lipstick and he remembers the control in the way she smiled at first. How that wore away while they talked. And then the tremble of her open mouth. And afterwards, lying in bed, he had told her about Mabel May and she had leaned over very carefully and painted his lips the same red as hers. 

So he thinks about that color against the skin of her legs: how his lips had moved over them. How they’d been warm. He thinks of marble statues, the statues the English stole from Rome, the Elgin Marbles. Chisel scratches, and things removed from home. 

 

-

 

Bucky wakes up just before dawn. Gabe is awake only by chance, drowsing on one of the hard wooden benches next to Steve, who hadn’t slept at all. He’s almost gray in the candlelight, the last little bit of the wick flickering, sputtering. They’ve burned all the candles through, and Gabe is thinking about what they can leave for the women to make up for everything they’ve done, what won’t be too incriminating to make it worth it. Alain is in the other room, and though he groaned fitfully through the night he’s quiet now, which grates on Gabe’s nerves more than his moaning had. 

Bucky doesn’t make any sound; Gabe just glances down and sees that Bucky’s eyes are open and staring up at the ceiling, the thick bunches of dried herbs above his head. For a moment Gabe thinks he’s died - but then Bucky blinks.

Steve exhales, like he’d thought the same thing. “Bucky?” he asks, and since there’s no one around but them he reaches down and squeezes Bucky’s hand.

Who squeezes back weakly, and smiles so broad his whole face wrinkles up with it, and whispers, “We gotta quit meeting like this.”

 


	10. Chapter 10

 

Bocage country.

Gabe saw it written before he ever heard it spoken, in a briefing supplied to them back in Italy. He’d been sifting languages for weeks, parsing out the differences between the Italian he’s learning and the French he knows, translating the Hydra documents they found at Cassino, picking up the odd Polish or Nepali fragments. But reading the briefing he’d thought  _ bocage _ first the way his mother might say it, the way his parents speak at home when there aren’t white folks to listen in. Bow-cage, the snap of the  _ w _ , the long drift of  _ a _ , boxed in. A cage of Belgian gates and Teller mines, of bunkers and pillboxes. Of Panzers bulldozing through vineyards, of towns and churches smashed to pieces from a great height.

The word sounds softer in Jacques’ mouth, as many things do, even when he’s so hot about something he spits syllables at Gabe and Monty, too impatient to wait for translation. Gabe himself doesn’t have much of an accent, just the faintest tinge that comes out mostly when he’s around his parents, or when he’s very drunk. Not quite Georgia, and not quite New York - his words possess all of their Arr’s, wrap crisply around the Tee-Aiches, his verbs rounded out respectably by their proper Gee’s. Flat, the way Jim sounds - ironed out Americana. Flat, like Steve, whose clothes have never been anything but threadbare and didn’t have the luxury Bucky did, of sounding like a punk hanging out on Delancey Street.

He’d asked Jim once to teach him some Japanese, but Jim had looked at him like he was crazy. “Isn’t gonna do you any good,” he said, and then admitted he didn’t remember it much anymore. Like he said, it hadn’t done him much good.

Bocage country. They’d seen photos of it, taken from the air. High above it looks like a patchwork quilt, like the inside of a cheap fur coat. Tear away the lining and underneath you find thousands of scraps, stitched crazily together from the leftover pieces of nicer coats. Mabel May had had one like it, and if you passed a hand over it the wrong way (as Mabel often had), you could feel where the edges were, where stiff bristly brown hairs ceased and then started again.

They’re hedgerows, or at least they started that way. A labyrinth of fields and pastures connected by sunken roads and ditches. In some places the trees grow fifteen feet high and form a bower over their heads, a welcome bit of shade as the days grow a little warmer. Ambush points are everywhere, and they lay traps in likely places: any space of flat ground you could anchor a mortar, a blind turn big enough to hide a tank. A few times they’re nearly surprised themselves.

Going south and west is slow travel, hampered by the thick walls of the bocage. For every kilometer they cross ten, maybe twelve hedgerows, each one a routine of scouting, climbing, falling, mining. Mostly when they peer over the green they only see the ruined countryside. Bombs have been fewer here than near the port of Calais, which mostly means that there’s still enough left to make it look like it used to be a place. They pass bodies scattered about in fields, burned out tanks on the side of the road, still full of dead crew. Cows, disemboweled by artillery blasts, hang upside from trees. The smell chokes the air, which is also sweet with apple blossoms and trees in full leaf.

Later, when his children and his children’s children ask about his war, it’ll be these days he’ll tell them about. He’ll tell them of trading cigarettes and soap with the locals for fresh eggs, tomatoes, apples, fresh cider to fill their canteens with. He’ll tell them of lying on his belly in the tall grass for hours, hunting not Nazis but rabbits, who ran blithely into snares and snapped their own necks.

He’ll leave out the dead cattle and dead Germans, and tell them of the high hedges, the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, the quiet of the countryside - a quiet one can barely imagine when your world is bounded by the East River and the Hudson, full of avenues that heave with people of every nation, creed, and color. Safe stories that he can tell even when he struggles to remember the lies the Army will give him along with his discharge papers, what his service record will look like on paper, and better because they happen to be true. Because they’d been idyllic days, as much as there are any in war, and far sweeter than the ones that came later on.

 

-

 

The rabbit hadn’t quite managed to kill itself. They all stare down at it as it flops weakly around. A slow strangulation wrapped around a tussock of long grass, which is bloody where the wire has cut into its neck. It doesn’t seem to notice them, or at least it doesn’t react as Steve hitches his pants up at the knees and crouches down over it. 

Gabe looks away as Steve breaks the thing’s neck. A bird lifts out of the trees and takes wing, but otherwise the country is silent around them, indifferent. It’s early still, some kind of vague predawn that makes the hair on the back of your neck lift. Mist still hangs in the air, painting the landscape in shades of eerie, impressionistic pastel.

Monty chuckles, amused. Humidity muffles the sound. “Where on earth does a -” and they both hear the pause, between the word he thinks and the word that comes out of his mouth, “ - city boy learn how to do that?” 

It’s a fair question, and one Gabe knows the answer to. He never met Bucky’s family - never wanted to, it hadn’t been like that, and besides that he never went to Brooklyn unless he absolutely had to - but he’d heard all about them, about their little house in Eastern Parkway where Bucky lived when he wasn’t in other people’s beds. The Barneses kept rabbits and chickens and a vegetable patch crammed in between the two, which had been fascinating: for Gabe, trees were in Central Park and animals lived on farms. Bucky had been good with a knife even then. He could take apart a chicken almost as fast as Gabe’s mama could.

Steve, by contrast, is awkward as he slips the garrote wire from around the rabbit’s neck, nearly cutting himself. He drags it flat by one hind leg and then picks it up by the scruff of its neck, fumbling Bucky’s big knife out of his belt.

“Give it here,” Monty says, when it looks clear that Steve means to skin the thing right there. Steve looks up at him, his mouth drawn in an unimpressed line.

“What,” he says, “a city boy like you gonna teach me how?” 

Monty turns red. His mustache twitches. “I’m not,” he says, “I grew up in Birmingham.”

His voice, Gabe notices, has shifted in tone. It’s slid upwards in register and softened around the edges, like melting caramel. Like Gabe’s own voice changes when it’s Mabel, almost. It’s been happening for awhile, though if he thinks back he can recall how Monty’s way of speaking shifted back to rigid uprightness around Peggy and has slowly, in her absence, softened once more. Of course they all do change a little around Peggy, Steve smiling more, Dugan getting more gruff - but this is somewhat different. 

Steve doesn’t look surprised at this admission, if it is one. The word Birmingham doesn’t mean anything to Gabe - to any of the Americans, probably. 

Birmingham. “Where’s that?” Gabe says, aware he sounds like Bucky. They’ve all picked up each other’s manner of speaking, the jokes they make at each other’s expense.

“Near Rhode Island,” Steve says, but he’s still watching Monty.

Monty says, “West Midlands, if you want to know.” He takes the rabbit from Steve, who lets him. It flops in his hand as if it’s a stuffed animal toy, loose around the snapped vertebrae in its neck. He takes out his clasp knife and flicks it open. He keeps in keen-edged shape, proud of British Army issue; light glints off the edge.

He places the rabbit onto the clean grass and begins cutting at the skin around the feet, as if taking off a pair of soft slippers the creature’s wearing. Grass and fur flicker in a sudden breeze that brings the tang of animal blood to Gabe’s nose. It smells different from human blood. More concentrated, darker, with a mulchy edge.

He slits the rabbit’s belly and lets the entrails slither out. Gabe swallows, remembering Alain; the rabbit’s coils of intestine are smaller, differently shaped, and somehow seem both more and less real, more and less intimate. Monty uses the knife’s marlin spike to begin picking the skin free of flesh. It makes a sound like paper tearing. Freed of skin, the rabbit slithers out all muscle: pink and shiny and winking with the bright white of tendon. They’ll spit-roast it hanging over a fire if they have time. There’s no need to worry about smoke; there’s smoke everywhere. 

Gabe sets to digging a hole to bury the rabbit’s entrails, though the staining pile they make on the ground is pathetically small and seems inclined to disappear on its own.

He offers a hand to Steve when he stands, who ignores it, of course. He’s got his eyes trained down the lane, one hand shaded over his face. Gabe looks as well, but hears nothing, sees nothing. The wind ruffles its hands through the trees, and draws a cool finger up the back of his neck. Could be just about anything out there.

“Monty,” Steve says, “how many rabbits do you think the Germans are catching?”

 

-

 

When they get back to camp, everything is quiet. It’s getting on towards real morning and the temperature has begun to rise. The only things stirring are the wind and the grass underfoot. The stillness gets on Gabe’s nerves. 

They move every few days, looking for quiet, tucked away spaces. This one is as good as any: set far back in a field under a lattice of fallen trees, which they’ve further disguised with some canvas that Steve and Gabe had painted to look like you could see right through it, to the bocage wall at their backs. They can see anything coming, unless that anything is mortar fire, or shells dropping from the sky, which happens more than Gabe would have thought. The RAF comes almost nightly now, and whoever is on watch hustles everyone out of their two man tents and into the long slit trenches they dig nearby, and they smoke cigarettes and drink until the world goes quiet and they can go back to their tattered sleep. Or more likely, stay awake and drink and smoke more cigarettes, too unnerved to go back to bed.

When Gabe brushes the canvas aside he finds that’s more or less what the other fellows are doing now: sleeping, and drinking. Dum Dum and Bucky are stripped to the waist, passing a bottle of calvados between them. Jim looks like he’s right out, propped up against the bocage wall like he was flung there bodily by a shell. Jacques’s the only one who still seems fully conscious, also half stripped - bent over something that’s smoking as much as his cigarette.

 

 

Steve kicks Bucky’s foot as he passes. Bucky grins up at him, his smile bright even in the stippled light of their shelter. Gabe and Bucky had spent most of the summer of 1939 drunk on cheap wine and each other, so though there’s a slant to Bucky’s smile Gabe can see he’s not drunk the way Dum Dum is. Bucky doesn’t seem to get drunk any more than he seems to sleep, these days.

When he sees the rabbit, Dum Dum lets out a pleasured grunt and reaches eagerly for it. He gets to work stoking the fire and heating up the metal tray that comes in the bottom of their rations - useful as a frying pan if you wrap your hand to hold it - and douses the rabbit in more calvados, which spits when it meets the metal and sends out a sweet, smoky, bloody smell into the air: like rank, wild perfume. 

They sit down to eat it with some two-day-old bread that’s about as hard as the Army biscuits that come in packets, but it is bread in its shape, and the shape of things has become important to all of them. This is bread-shaped food, this is the shape of a life, this is your gear in order, soldier. They all wear uniforms. They take them to pieces, but they wear them. 

 

-

 

They spend their days drinking calvados in the sunshine. They have a list of targets for the nighttime but for once it’s only Steve who knows them, who keeps the treasure map in his head alone. They may be blown to bits by the RAF but more likely they will be shot or caught by the Germans, who are thick among the trees. They left the inflatables hidden in a stone barn that they painted to look like bombed out ruins. No need to fake an army where there shouldn’t be one, not for a few more weeks. Gabe doesn’t know the exact date: this, too, is a thing only Steve knows. 

None of them need to be told that it’s safer this way. That a bullet to the head would be the best thing they could hope for, Captain America and his merry men caught behind enemy lines, alone, isolated, without reinforcements. No chance of another work camp, or mercy. They don’t need to see any more of Captain America’s movies to know their value has increased immeasurably beyond the strength of their bodies.

Radio communication is limited. They listen - Jim listens - for set hours in a day, and leaves the radio abandoned for the rest. Mostly they know what they are to do, or at least Steve does. He directs them to fuel depots, to a water purification factory. They stumble over V1 launch sites, which Monty takes particular pleasure in dismantling, and killing the men who have been launching rockets at London. Mostly Gabe sees these places at a distance, removed. His work is painting canvas, sending false signals, and once placing three of Dernier’s explosives in the thin branches of a tree they think Nazis will pass by, and creeping silently away. 

He has yet to kill a man: he and Steve and Dum Dum alike. The close up work is done for them, by Jim and Monty and Jacques, and by Bucky who is only Bucky here in the bocage, cut free from his costume.

This is a thing that goes unsaid, like how Jim will always skin the rest of them in poker and they’ll be forced to barter any number of things to get their cigarettes back, and how no matter who takes first watch Bucky will take the last because he sleeps worse than any of them. And how even though Gabe knows Jacques has a lock of hair coiled neatly around the cyanide pill hidden in his wristwatch, he has never yet told them anything about the woman who gave it to him.

They are all cut loose, abandoned. The war unspools without them.

 

-

 

He does ask Jacques about her, once. Crouched in their slit trench while Monty’s countrymen gleefully drop bombs around them. The air between them thick, that scorched-metal smell. In the morning it will smell like apple blossoms again, and like dead cattle. The calvados had wound up in someone else’s trench so what they have between them is only cider, frothy and sweet and just beginning to ferment in Dugan’s canteen. The bombs are landing close enough that Gabe’s teeth are rattling around the cloying taste of it, but Jacques is smiling, tilting his head back against the dirt wall so he can see the lights flash over the trees.

“There’ll be nothing left of France, the rate they’re going,” Gabe says. They don’t have to shout because the walls squeeze closely in on them. 

Jacques only shrugs and lifts the cigarette to his mouth. “Maybe not,” he allows.

From somewhere else they can hear Bucky laughing and cursing, but not the specifics. It’s a clear night, a good night for the blissful planes high overhead to wreck some havoc, and Jacques’ face is easy to see in the starry light. Gabe can barely see the outline of his own black hands, finds the shape of himself by the gray-green edges of the uniform.

“Do you think much about it?” Gabe asks. “About after the war.” 

“Non,” Jacques says, and seems like he’ll leave it at that, but he’s got his hand tucked inside his jacket, in the pocket where he keeps the wristwatch at night so Gabe ventures, hesitant, “Will you find your woman again?” 

Jacques laughs, a bright flash of teeth in the night. “In this life or the next.” He offers Gabe a smile. Gabe can’t quite muster one in return. There’s something dangerous around the edges of Jacques’, and something empty in his eyes.

“Three prison camps before Kreischberg,” Jacques tells him, after a moment. He’s pulled the watch out of his pocket now. His thumb strokes the top of it, over the glass behind which the second hand ticks. “The first, Romainville. There was much movement there, in and out, a throughway to the other places they would send us. Ah, but then they decided to move out all the men. So Simone told me: you escape, and I will join you. That time, this worked. The next time, I was caught and she was not. Three months. I broke out. The third time, they know who we are. They capture us both and tell us, if one of you goes, we will kill the other. They move us to different camps. So of course, she tells me to run while I am being transported.” He pauses. He glances up at the sky, then down, shrugs as if settling himself inside of his coat, and then tucks the watch back in his pocket. He pats it and then pulls his collar up, chin to chest, hiding the lower half of his face.

“I did not run that time. They took us to Kreischberg. Then I thought, no, we must try to escape. They lie all the time. They forget. So… who knows?”

Gabe can’t see his face. He does him the courtesy of following his gaze up to the sky. Flares flash in the distance, red and blue. For once he can’t think of the French words for what he wants to say.

“So you…” he says.

“Alors,” Jacques says. Alors: it’s a transition to another topic or the end of one. In French, it can be left that way, floating.

“Alors,” Jacques says again, finally: “When France is free.” He turns the canteen over between his hands, but doesn’t drink. The metal is sticky; it’s left a sweet imprint on Gabe’s fingers. He brings them to his mouth, and the taste sears his tongue and throat like tears. When he looks up, Jacques is smiling, his expression clear and bright.

Gabe puts his damp fingers into his coat to touch the hard outline of the cyanide pill, sewn into the thin cotton lining. Easy enough to tear, to palm the pill into his mouth unnoticed if - 

But the thought feels too morbid to examine. He takes the cider back from Jacques’ loose hands.

 

-

 

The sun is as brilliant as a lamp compared to the coal-smoke smudges in the sky back home. Here the sky is an indeterminate shade of afternoon like a Monet or Van Gogh, a blurring blue spiral that sucks heat up out of the ground and scatters it shimmering through the air. 

Gabe leans back against a log side-by-side with Jacques. He smells like cordite and sulfur. Steve and Bucky sit next to each other, also pressed close. Monty has sprawled on his belly by the fire, taking intermittent slugs of whatever’s left in the bottle and writing a letter. Jim eyes him for a while and then rummages for his own paper and pen, though he defaults to staring off into the distance and squinting like he can’t figure out what to write. 

Dugan’s lying on his back shuffling a pack of cards in midair. The cards flitter and whir. He’s good with them. He learned it from one of the magicians in the circus. “What’s that?” he asks Monty, kicking him with one foot. 

Monty grunts when Dugan’s foot connects with his ribs. He pushes up to sit tailor-style on the ground, still holding his letter carefully in one hand, out of kicking range. “What do you think it is?” he says.

“She’s already gone ‘n’ married you,” Dugan points out, “and how’s it gonna get to England anyway?” He holds out the deck of cards. Monty isn’t a bad player, and Dugan’s just trying to get his attention.

Monty takes the cards from Dugan and starts dealing. Gabe lifts a hand to indicate he’ll get in on the game, and so do Bucky and Steve. With Bucky in, Jim joins too. Gabe looks at over at Jacques, inviting him without a word, but Jacques only grunts, chewing a little on the end of his cigarette. “The red ink on this is explosive,” he says in French, which surprises Gabe. By now they all can mostly understand without Gabe explaining, but Jacques usually takes pity on the Americans and uses English anyway. To be friendly, he’s said to Gabe.

“Not enough to be useful, I’d imagine,” says Monty, looking thoughtfully over his cards.

“So - writing letters, huh?” Bucky says, squinting at him.

“ _Your_ wife is right here,” Dugan says. He’s in a mood today. He almost always is.

Bucky tenses all over. Gabe does too, some feeling like ice filling up his chest. You never get rid of it, that jagged edge of distrust: some point they’ll turn on you, they’ll hurt you. Steve’s the only one of them who doesn’t move. He flicks a cool eye up over his cards and says, “I call.”

Dugan breaks eye contact to snort and fumble and finally throw his cards down. Monty murmurs to himself, looking over his hand, face unreadable. Gabe eyes his own hand. “I’ll raise,” he says, and throws in two cigarettes.

“What the hell do you say to her?” Jim asks, into the brief silence that follows: where someone could pick up Dugan’s comment or not. Bucky’s eyes fix on him, but Jim’s directing the question to Monty, his face creased in consternation. Gabe can sympathize. He’s been in Europe for about nine months now, and has sent back fifteen letters to his parents, about driving trucks and carrying trays and washing dishes. Quiet letters that his mother would be happy to receive. She wouldn’t mind the thought of him carrying trays at all, if it kept him off the front lines - but then again she never asked much where he went at night, or what he spent his money on, or why he wanted to so badly to go to college. Maybe Jim’s more used to telling truths to his loved ones.

Monty wiggles his mustache, considering, and throws down two cigarettes as well. “It’s what one thinks to be true that matters,” he says finally. His actor’s voice, which has been drifting sideways in the weeks they’ve been in bocage country, is back. His vowels roll out round and crisp.  “Herein will I imitate the sun, which doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world; that when he pleases again to be himself …” 

Jim looks appalled. “The hell is that supposed to mean?” he asks.

“Means he’s sending poetry instead of lies,” Dugan answers.

“Stick to the lies,” Bucky advises. 

“It’s Henry IV,” Monty says, sounding injured. “Shakespeare. ‘When he please to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at.’ ”

Gabe laughs. “So who does that make us? Dost thou speak like a king?”

“Certainly not as a soldier,” Monty says. “Not anymore, at least.”

“It’s not so bad,” Bucky says. “This style of soldiering.”

“Oh yes,” Monty says. “Sneaking around in the dead of night, killing men as they sleep. All in the noble service of the real army. We certainly won’t be coming out of this as kings, or as heroes.”

Two nights ago they’d been woken as usual by the drone of planes, but instead of bombs they’d watched paper rain down, fluttering in the gray air like the bats Gabe used to see sometimes in Central Park. Steve had been the one to climb out of his trench, and carry back to them an armload of leaflets, which he’d passed to Bucky to read.

“They’re telling the Germans to surrender,” Bucky said. “That they’ll be treated well by the Americans.”

Gabe reached for one of the papers, and Bucky handed it over with a dark look in his eyes. It did tell the Germans to surrender, or at least that was part of what it said. Steve rubbed a thumb over the top of the sheet in his hand, which was stamped with a red and blue circle, and a white star in the middle. Others, crumpled in Bucky’s big hands, had Captain America himself on them, looking big and strong and undefeatable. In the morning Bucky had joked about using it as toilet paper, but Gabe isn’t sure if anyone is. They’ve been using it as kindling instead.

“What’s he saying?” Jacques asks Gabe now, because even if he’s gotten in the habit of dumbing down his French for the Americans, sometimes they forget to speak English he can understand.

“Monty prefers the straight-forward kind of war,” Gabe answers, and because he’s caught the spirit of it and knows Monty can understand him, adds in English, “We passed their graves: the dead men there, winners or losers, did not care. In the dark they couldn’t see who had gained the victory.”

“War is war, you mean. But it isn’t the war that rankles me so, is it,” Monty says. He throws a handful of leaflets onto the fire, pointedly. They snap and hiss as the flame licks at them: the red ink, maybe. “To me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights me not.”

“But woman does,” Gabe says.

“By your smiling you seem to say so,” Monty says, and he sounds tired. He looks at Jim. “My Lillian is in the countryside, with my parents. She misses London terribly, but then she’d found even Oxford stifling. That was where we met, you know. Not quite the match her parents had hoped for, a blacksmith’s son. But we’ve had six happy years that I can write her about, and if Oxford didn’t teach me to be a soldier it did still fill my head with poetry, so yes, I write her poems as well.”

“À quoi sert la po é sie?” Jacques mutters, and spits on the ground.

“What use is Captain America?” Monty fires back.

Gabe looks at Bucky, who shrugs minutely. “Hope,” Steve says.

Monty snorts. “ _ Hope _ will be landing on Gold Beach,” he says. 

“Yeah, to get shredded by mines and machine guns,” Jim says. “No thanks.”

“That’s a lot of firepower that won’t be on that beach, thanks to us,” Steve says. 

“I fold,” Bucky says, and snags one of the cigarettes out of the pot.

 

-

 

It’s barely a week later that they make a liar out of Captain America.

It rains that morning, wet and humid wind coming from the shore, shaking through the bocage like it could bring all those walls down on top of them. They’re all of them miserable and waterlogged, waiting crabbily for Steve to decide whether they’re going through with that night’s mission, which is to blow a bridge on a road that lead towards Caen. The RAF had given bombing the hell out of them a miss, so although they’d slept long and well they’d also slept through the start of the storm, and the little pit where they made their fire had gotten wet through. They’re celebrating six full weeks in Normandy with cold rations and soggy underwear. 

Gabe is standing a little ways away from their shelter, scraping ration tins clean with Bucky’s big knife. Angry about the raindrops falling fat and heavy on his shoulders. Hungry and sick and tired of the smell of Jim’s sleeping body in the tent they shared, of Dum Dum’s cigars, of that prickle between his shoulder blades that felt like someone was always aiming a gun there. But when it happens -

\- when it happens -

When it happens, Gabe is standing a little ways away from the rest of them, scraping his ration tins clean with Bucky’s big knife, and a German soldier falls out of the sky and lands clumsily next to him. 

It must be a scout. They climb the hedges. 

There’s a moment of strange comedy. The German is on the ground and while he’s down Gabe’s first instinct is to help him up, but then, like the flurry of a rabbit kicking in a trap -  _ un coup, une saccade, une tressaillement _ \- the German has scrambled his legs under him and stood and he’s unslung the long thing of a bayonet and then - 

_ Et puis - _

There’s a hiss, the beginning of words in the kraut’s throat, and the smell of breath and metal and

There’s just a moment the kraut stares at him like he can’t figure out what to do and then Gabe drops the trays in his hands. 

They fall soundlessly as if he’s standing over a pit. Later he remembers that, dropping the trays and they are gone out of his field of vision or memory as if disappearing into a gaping void opened up at his feet.

He still has his knife, and he takes a solid step forward and drives it up through fabric, and presses, and feels it puncture flesh and it’s not like sinking metal into meat at all, it’s like piercing a balloon but heavier like drumskin that lets go after it’s punctured

_ Punct - _

The German’s mouth opens too, and he makes a thrust forward with the bayonet but it’s pointing over Gabe’s shoulder and all that happens is he jerks their bodies closer. Wet warmth spills over Gabe’s hands. He has the impulse to grab the German by the waist and hold him up. The kraut fights him. He says words in German, very fast.  _ Gott. Hurr. Huren… Hurr - ach. Meine Mutter. Mutter. Was? Was? _

Gabe has one hand on the German’s hips. The knife is sunk deep in his guts angled up; he’s gotten it in under the kraut’s ribs. The bayonet has fallen at an awkward angle in his elbow, held up by the strap. 

All of this takes place in the span of a few moments, only a breath or two. The German’s mouth is still moving. His hand spasms.  _ Tic. Truc. _

His knife is slippery. It comes out easier than it came in, bringing with it a slithering stink.

He hears a shout in German, then one closer up and he’s bowled over from behind. Now he’s on the ground, sticky dirt on his face, and he scrambles up too, and there’s an arm around him and for a moment he starts to thrash but it’s Bucky’s arm and Bucky’s got his shield up over them. There’s the dull  _ plink plink  _ of sound, like rain on a tin roof: bullets bouncing off the thin metal covering their heads. Over the round top edge Gabe sees three more krauts land and get wild-eyed to their feet. One has a pistol, the other’s scrabbling for his bayonet where it’s slung around his shoulders, and the other has a sprig of hedge stuck in the collar of his shirt. 

For a moment Gabe thinks they’re all going to shoot him, but then Steve and Jacques and Monty and Dum Dum launch themselves from the shelter, guns cocked. The Germans flinch; maybe they hadn’t even meant to come over the wall at this spot, maybe they had thought Gabe was alone, maybe they didn’t think they’d be outnumbered. Everyone is shouting, the German incomprehensible, the sound like mad and hungry dogs.

On the ground next to him and Bucky is the dead German, the one that Gabe has just killed, his eyes wide and shocked and empty.

Then one of the Germans puts a hand up, fingers pointed to the sky. He’s staring down at the shield, at Bucky behind it. He has an insignia on his sleeve, and when he gestures to his companions they all stop shouting and stand there, guns still pointed, trembling.

Bucky stands up with his shield glinting on his arm. He pushes Gabe behind him, stumbling back towards the others where cold hands receive him. He feels Jacques’ hand on his shoulder, his sleeve, patting him down, but the blood on Gabe’s arm isn’t his, not any more than the knife still in his hand.

_“Sie sind der Kapitän?”_ asks one of the Germans, the one with the insignia. “Kapitän Amerika?” 

_“Ja,”_ Bucky answers, _“Ja, das bin ich.”_ He’s been hit, Gabe sees: the leg of his pant has a long tear in it where a bullet has passed through, and blood is wetting down his sock. 

Up close the Germans are young, with round baby faces, perfect red circles on their apple cheeks, like the white porcelain dolls Gabe’s only ever seen through the windows on Fifth Avenue. They say something else and Bucky stiffens. He hefts the pistol that he’s got in the hand not holding the shield.

“What’d they say?” someone says, and someone else says, “Put the fucking guns down!” but Bucky doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move.

This is his job, this is Mabel’s, this is - but all that comes out of his mouth is French, he says, _“Ils se rendent,”_ he says, _“ils veulent se rendre au Capitaine d’Amérique.”_

“Shoot them,” Steve says. 

Gabe is on his feet, his knees weak underneath him. Jacques’ hand on his elbow holding him upright. They all look at Steve, even the Germans, who appear only curious - the blank, uncomprehending look on their face that says they don’t understand,  _ sie sprechen kein Englisch _ , and Bucky says, “But they’re surrendering.”

“Shoot them,” Steve says again, and his voice is steady and clear, the only real thing in the world, so Bucky does.

The pistol cracks twice in his hand. It’s louder than the sirens that tear down Lenox Avenue at night, louder than the shells that rain down on them, louder than the thrum of Gabe’s heartbeat, trembling in his fingertips. A hole the size of a quarter appears in the forehead of the kraut who had taken one hand off his gun. Another in the cheek of the one behind him, right in that rosy bloom, that flush of youth. 

The third looks at Bucky, astonishment writ large, and then the front of his uniform puffs up with air: behind Gabe, Jacques has taken the third shot. The German’s hands fly up in the sky like birds. 

The krauts land in a heap, eyes open and still wide with surprise. The ground beneath them drinks up all the blood.

“Pack up camp,” someone says. “We need to get moving, in case there are more of them close by.” 

Then he says - someone must be looking at him, at Steve, because it’s Steve speaking - “Nine days until Overlord. Our attention needs to be on the mission and staying out of sight.”

“Okay, Cap,” Dum Dum says, and there’s the sound of boots shuffling over the earth, the jingle of the krauts’ belts as someone turns one over, starts to strip the body of weapons. A touch on Gabe’s arm, small, warm, firm, Steve, guiding Gabe around by his elbow. And he looks Gabe up and down, so Gabe, too, looks himself up and down, finds his right arm up to the elbow sheathed in blood like a satin glove. The urge to vomit again rises thick in his throat.

“You did fine,” Steve says, softer. And Gabe nods, numb. They’d laughed, both of them, in training. With bayonets heavy in their hands, stabbing straw dummies. Pointed this way and that; run this way and that; kill this thing and that.  _ Look, I got the bitch who poured wine on my best blouse. Look, that’s one for the cop who tried to make me suck him off to stay out of jail. Ha, snuffed the man who beat me up outside the automat. _ Steve isn’t laughing now, but he doesn’t look all that upset, either. He’s just looking up at Gabe, steady, still.

“You did just fine, May,” he says, “You’re all right. Go get cleaned up.”

“Okay, Cap,” Gabe manages.

He ducks into their shelter to grab the big metal can of water. It’s heavy. He barely notices the weight, his footsteps uneven through the muddy ground. He makes it fifty paces, maybe more - just far enough that the noise of Dum Dum and Monty tearing down the camp fades, all the privacy that anyone ever gets in the Army. He folds over at the waist and vomits his cold rations onto the wet, trampled grass. Meat hash. Tasted bad enough going down, worse coming up. Up his nose too, acidic, funky like Jim’s sock feet. 

A footstep crackles behind him, and Gabe whirls, landing hard on his ass. The bloodied knife is back in his hand, but it’s only Bucky - Bucky, looking down at him from a great height. 

Gabe turns away. He sets the knife down and out of the corner of his eye, sees Bucky pick it up and start wiping it clean on the long grass. Mabel used to be good at getting stains of of her dresses - mending any little tear. But he can’t think of how. Had it been salt sprinkled thick over the seep of red wine? Or seltzer - bought in thick glass bottles from the corner store, or begged off a forgiving bartender. If he left it long enough, would the rain wash it all away?

The tin, at least, has been cleaned by the rain. He fills it with a little water from the jug and carefully presses the soiled fabric into it. It bleeds pink trails into the water. He rubs his thumb over the stain and the water blushes like he’s washing out a paintbrush.

Bucky sets the knife back down on the grass, within Gabe’s reach. He sets the shield down too, and settles down on the ground, close enough that Gabe can feel the warmth of his shoulder through the cotton cloth of his uniform. He wraps his arms around his knees. He’s rolled his pants up, displaying the bullet wound to the indifferent air: just a long scratch, not nearly as bad as Gabe would have thought, with all that blood.

Gabe pulls his blouse out of the water and wrings it dry. A clean towel, that’s what he needs. Blot stains. Don’t rub them in. The ground is blurry with rain. Bucky settles an arm around his shoulders, and Gabe goes automatically, lets Bucky tuck him in against his broad chest. Mabel had been three inches taller than Bucky in her heels, but he and Gabe are exactly the same height.

Bucky’s cheek presses against Gabe’s temple, scratchy with the beginning of a beard. The shield rests against his foot. Gabe watches the raindrops fall  _ plink plink  _ against the rounded surface and roll off, dew-like, into the grass. 

He thinks maybe they’d sat like this once. Sat and listened to the rain. Tucked safe and sound in a room in an hourly motel, the window cracked to let out the smell. Under the bare shelter of tree branches in the knotty sanctity of Central Park. Maybe it hadn’t even been Bucky - maybe it was someone else. The details are faint and smeared like watercolors, his memory washed empty and clean.

 


	11. Chapter 11

 

It’s the cold that Steve feels first, before the absence of another body in the narrow bedroll. The cold, an ache in his bones, an ache in his  _ head  _ like he’s been out drinking til dawn. When he breathes out he sees a plume of smoke through his slitted eyes, cut crossways by lashes. It’s pretty, like slashes of black paint on a canvas, so he does it again. His body hurts, but it always hurts, and he’d gotten used to an empty bed when Bucky was away at Camp McCoy. 

His arms shake when he pushes himself up, stiff like a plank of wood. Two sweaters and one from Bucky’s kit under the winter coat they all were issued, the one Dugan cut down to Steve’s size before they’d even shipped out. Three pairs of socks too, and all the Captain America pamphlets he could keep hold of stuffed down his long underwear for insulation. It isn’t even that cold, but the cold eats Steve up sometimes.

He finds Bucky out by the fire like he’s expecting to. It’s burned down to embers, and Bucky is as still as a statue in the gray light, still closer to night than day. His hands are wrapped around his rifle, ice cold when Steve touches them, testing Bucky’s grip.

 

 

Steve bends his aching spine over the coals, stirring them with a stick. There are some twigs they have piled up for kindling nearby and a little log that Steve lays down over the fire. He hears Bucky rumble over his shoulder, “You’re gonna snuff it out.”

“It’ll be alright,” Steve says, and stands looking over the pit with his hands stuffed in his pockets, rooting around for his little tin of pills. He lets them dissolve under his tongue; they work faster that way, shot right into his bloodstream, or at least that’s the way he thinks of it.

He hears the click of metal behind him: Bucky’s hands around the rifle, or the shield shifting against his hip. The air is salty, something in it he can taste, so different than the smell of the East River, or even Coney Island: gritty, like the sound of seagulls. They’re too far inland to hear the waves even if he can smell the Channel, but they’ll be able to hear other things soon enough. 

“They’ll have launched the ships by now,” Steve says. Planes, too, enough to turn the sky into glittering aluminium, same as the silver foil they’ll be dropping over Calais to keep the Nazis away from Normandy for as long as possible. Through the gloomy, rainy dawn the foil might well look like an army crossing from Dover; even real soldiers stoop to trickery sometimes. “What do you bet the seagulls will make of it?”

Bucky shifts on his makeshift stool. “Don’t know,” he says, and Steve hums to himself: Bucky’s right, they may not be able to see anything at all through the choppy surf. But maybe they’d be astonished to see the air turn thick with parachutes and plywood planes gliding silently to earth. Steve had seen the numbers, spelled out in dry columns under the curl of Phillips’ hand: ten thousand aircraft, seven thousand ships, a Biblical number of men pitching themselves onto the continent.  _ From the tribe of Zubulun 12,000, from the tribe of Joseph 12,000, from the tribe of Benjamin 12,000 _ \- although last Steve had heard it would be closer to 150,000 men, from God alone knew how many tribes.

The countryside around their camp is quiet and they endure patiently. At patient as Steve ever is, which under normal circumstances Buck would be the first to point out. It’s on the tip of Steve’s tongue to tease him: “ _ Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe _ .” Or, irrepressible:  _ “Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters _ .”

But Scriptures annoy Bucky under the best of circumstances, and what comes out of Steve’s mouth instead is, “Do you think we’ve done enough?” 

His voice is hushed in the rain, enough that maybe Bucky doesn’t hear him, doesn’t answer. At Steve’s feet, the little log smolders and goes out.

 

-

 

Dawn breaks at 0520, or rather doesn’t: the gray mist becomes a lighter gray. They huddle in Dum Dum’s tent as the first raindrops start to fall; Dum Dum sleeps alone with the equipment. His tent smells of cigars and masturbation, and Jim sits as close to the flap as he can, the headset crooked over his cap as he listens intently.

The invasion had been scheduled for June 4th, which had poured rain and cracked lighting - no good for an ocean crossing. The storm had passed but the clouds had lingered on the 5th, thick and thunderous overhead - poor conditions for bombers and parachutists.  _ And on the third day He rises -  _ well, it was happening now, weather be damned.

The big guns had started ten or fifteen minutes ago. Huge, ripping claps, muffled only a little by the distance and the wind. Warships, turned broadside to the beaches, softening up Hitler’s Atlantic wall. There’s smoke on the wind, which is blowing their way.

“That rain’s gonna have them down on our heads,” Gabe says nervously, looking up at the heavens. There might as well be a beehive on the other side of the trees, for all they can see of the planes droning overhead.

“This one’s German,” Jim says, and passes Gabe a scrap of paper with dots and dashes written all over it.  _ Dear Mika, France is terrible but I am _ , Steve sees written across the top of it before Gabe tilts it away, squinting down at the sheet of paper.

“They’ve sunk a destroyer off Luc-sur-Mer,” Gabe translates, “there are men coming onto the beach there.” Steve closes his eyes and traces mental fingers over the big map laid out in Phillips’ office. Sword Beach. British 3rd Infantry. Earlier than the others. Two pillboxes on the hills above them, brimming with machine guns and anti-tank weaponry, chopping up the water in front of the landing crafts. 

Overhead the bombers make another pass, invisible in the mists. Bucky lights another cigarette, his boots shuffling around outside of Dum Dum’s tent, also unseen. The bombing goes on for what feels like hours, punctuated only by the erratic heartbeat of Morse code coming faintly through Jim’s headset. Colleville, Arromanches, Sainte-Honorine: the vast stretch between Omaha and Gold beaches. The landscape would look like the surface of the moon, to the tens of thousands of men crossing the rough waters of the Channel.

“First landing craft are beaching on Utah and Omaha,” Jim says. “Taking heavy fire.” Steve closes his eyes and takes a long breath, seeking the smell of Bucky’s cigarettes. “Casualties are to be assumed,” Phillips had said, passing down the news and orders that came from Eisenhower himself. The Nazis had been throwing mines, concrete, money and men at the Atlantic wall since 1942; for the last half year the pace had grown feverish. They’d filled northern France with more than six million mines and built hundreds of concrete bunkers along the beachheads, stuffed full of soldiers staring patiently at the gray water. Or playing cards the way Dum Dum is attempting to, grumbling around his cigar at being kicked out of his own tent.

Casualties were to be assumed.

“Qu'est-ce qui se passe maintenant?” Dernier asks.

Bent over his notebook, Jim flicks a dark look up at the rest of them, but doesn’t say anything. Just keeps writing down the news. “Rommel’s done a damn good job,” Phillips had said, looking down at the big map. Fingertips on aerial shots of the beaches at low tide, iron hedgehogs sprinkled across the sand like a child’s forgotten set of jacks. 

“We should lend a hand,” Monty says now, crouched down next to Jim, steadying himself with one hand on the radio. 

“Our orders are to stay put,” Dugan says, looking up from his cards. They had been; the orders were clear. Their unit was too strategically valuable. Stay put, wait for D+1 objectives to be achieved. Brass will radio instructions once it’s safe to do so. The propaganda value of Captain America worth more than neoprene tanks now. Maybe worth more than real ones too.

“21st Panzer Division has been ordered to the beachhead,” Gabe reports, neck curved over his torn sheets of paper, “and there’s infantry moving north through Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer.” Dernier curses, his restless shadow bouncing from one side of the tent to the other.

“It’d be suicide, getting down on that beach,” Jim says. “We’d be cut to ribbons before we got anywhere near.”

“We don’t need to be on the beach,” Monty argues, looking to Steve. “We can send false radio messages, lead those Jerries straight into each other.”

“That won’t be much help to the infantry,” Gabe says. Dernier looks at him, appalled, before Gabe follows up with, “Those bigs guns are the problem. Those little pillboxes. The Nazis have the high ground and all that fortification.”

“Can’t shoot behind themselves,” Steve muses.

They’ve seen some of the batteries themselves, creeping around in the humid night. Bucky had found the first one, stumbled on it accidentally when they were on their way to plant mines in the roads that had built it. The site had been unmarked on their maps, unmentioned in the coded briefings they received sometimes, through Resistance informants. It had been dumb luck alone that he and Jim hadn’t roused the guards, or the hundreds of men they spent hours watching the next day, roaming in and around the trenches and the buried bunkers. Hardly any of it showed from above ground: only a few deep depressions in the grass, hiding gun pits invisible to aerial surveillance. 

“Naval artillery not knocking ‘em out?” he asks. He directs the question to Jim, who shakes his head.

“Not so far,” he says, grimacing. “Our ships reported a few direct hits on Pointe du Hoc before they had to cease fire for infantry landing, but they’re still being fired on. There’s been a smokescreen ordered to protect the ships.”

Pointe du Hoc, though, was a known target. Had been for years. The highest point along the cliffs, and straddling two points of Allied attack. Thick concrete burrowed into the hillside, like some kind of strange, malevolent animal in its nest. The barrel of a gun poking out between its lips, big enough for Steve to put his head into. Big enough to punch holes in tanks, and in the landing crafts coming off the water, trying to spill their human cargo close enough to shore that they wouldn’t drown before they got shot.

“Their eyes will be on the ships,” Dernier says, and more in French that’s too fast for Steve to follow, but his mind leaps ahead of the translation:

Steal a Nazi truck from the nearest town, put Monty at the wheel in one of the uniforms they’d stripped off a corpse. Dernier beside him, playing the role of collaborator; everyone else in the back. The German Monty learned from Bucky shoddy but enough to be waved inside a by a distracted guard. Two hundred infantry stationed inside, all eyes on the invasion, all hands on the 155mm guns that made up the bulk of the battery’s defensive capabilities. A few of Stark’s modified Daisy Cutters, which had been dropped to them with their resupply last week, flung into each covered casemate …

Not much worse than catching shells, Steve thinks.

Bucky’s boots scrape back and forth outside the tent. He hadn’t much to say to Steve this morning after the fire went out, after the rest of their company was roused by expectation and the far-off noise of the invasion. The canvas is too thick to see the shape of him, just the barest flash coming from under the flap as he moves in and out of the weak light, and then stops.

“Suit up,” Steve says.

-  
  


By the time Steve and Dum Dum find their way down to the beachheads, they find that Captain America has preceded them.

Steve had expected it, of course - Jim had taken the big radio, leaving them with the little set they’d taken from an abandoned farmhouse. It had just enough range on it to pick up the broadcast from the BBC, describing the battle from across the Channel as it happened only a few miles away from where Steve and Dugan sat waiting. Dispatches from the front, spaced every few hours, read calmly in English tones: 

“We are in the ships. The next time our feet touch dry land it will be on the soil of Europe. For the moment we all exist in a peculiar secret world of our own - England behind, yet visible, and a certain beach on the continent as yet undisturbed by the thunder of our attack.

“That feeling of being people apart prevails among all the thousands of men now assembled and ready to go. But there is a feeling of relief, too, that at long last we are off. That this is the real thing.”

And it was; the real thing, that is. Staggering in size. Steve, at least, is staggered, and beside him Dugan is uncharacteristically quiet as they crest the hill and stand in awe.

The air is clotted with blimps and planes ferrying the wounded back to England. On the sand are hundreds of trucks, half-tracks, tanks, many thousands of men coming off beached ships. From above they look like ants, or like the metal soldiers Bucky had as a boy, which Steve had coveted like few other things he’s wanted in his life. The water itself was thick with ships, stuffed full to the far horizon and miles to either side. Beyond, hundreds of blockships waited patiently to be scuttled along the beach, laying the first foundations of a monumental feat of engineering. When the Allies had found themselves unable to secure harbors at Calais, they’d decided to build artificial ones in Normandy instead. 

They pick their way gingerly down the cliffs. Up close the wreckage is vast and startling. Crushed jeeps, gray with ash and fire. Miles of wire - barbed, but also to lay for radio and telephone - tangle in with seaweed along the water mark. Helmets and boots and jackets strewn across the sand, here and there still occupied by their owners. Sheets of paper blow about in the wind, not quite strong enough to disturb soggy cigarettes, as thick on the sand as bullet casings and seashells. The lines of men slogging through the scrubby sand and up the high bluffs look at Steve with some curiosity, but not much. 

There are soldiers picking through piles of weapons for anything still worth firing. In the water there are the bodies of men, and other men standing knee deep in the waves discussing how to get to them. Whether it was worth swimming out into the still-mined waters, or waiting for the tide to sweep the bodies to shore, or sending a mine flailer into the water to at least make it safe for the soldiers still up and walking around. Still also scores of men filling in the deep trenches that zigzagged along the beach, that had forced their invading army into tight bottlenecks to get up off the sands, rife with mines and sniper fire.

And everywhere, everywhere are red and blue circles, with white stars painted in the middle. The shield is painted on the sides of tanks, pinned as fabric scraps to overstuffed infantry packs. There are white wings and clumsy A’s painted on the helmets of soldiers. Captain America had landed at Normandy, even if Bucky himself is nowhere to be seen. 

Dazed and facing the wrong way for his good ear, Steve doesn’t hear footfalls. He feels Dugan rear back, but isn’t quick enough to stop Dernier from barreling into them both and lifting Steve right off the damn ground. He kicks out, mostly without effect - one boot connecting with Dugan’s kneecap, who howls and hops around. Dernier is also howling, but with laughter instead, and then Gabe’s arms are around Steve too and they all go toppling down into the wet sand together.

“Vive la France!” Dernier is saying, his eyes almost creased shut with smiling, and red with tears. “On to Paris! We will go to Germany as conquerors and free men!”

“Get off,” Steve says, patting Dernier on the back. Dum Dum helps everyone to their feet, brushing sand off shoulders absently. “Everyone’s okay?” Steve asks, and feels Gabe’s fingers tighten on his arm.

“Fine,” he says hurriedly, when Steve gives him a sharp look. “We thought once Bucky got hit, but - everyone’s fine. It was the damnedest thing, Steve. The base at Pointe du Hoc was empty. The guns were all gone, all of them.”

“They were firing from the rear base, the hidden one,” Steve says, peering into the high bluffs as if he could spot it from where he stood. He can’t see much of anything, soldiers fading to smears of abstract colors, about as easy to pick out as leaves in a wind. There: a field hospital, topped with a stark cross bleeding into a field of white. There: sparkling silver wire cutting across penned in prisoners, unmoving, faces only a pale blur over the gray green of their uniforms. There: the triangle of broad blue shoulders and white waist, red stripes (at least, Steve’s been told they’re red), surrounded by infantry-drab admirers. 

“Yeah,” Gabe says. “We got on the horn to our guys and let them know the coordinates they should be firing at instead. Germans picked our signal up, but - ” here Dernier laughs, broad and happy, “ - they didn’t have anything big enough to knock out their own base, so.” He shrugs. “The USS Satterlee took out Maisy battery, and we went on to the beaches.”

The rest Steve had heard on the BBC, from Alan Melville reporting breathlessly from the Normandy beachhead. That red white and blue figure appearing up on the cliffs, shield glinting in the sunlight that had just begun to break through the morning storm. Captain America razing a broad swath across the machine gun nests dotting the cliffs, preceded by the odd screaming noise of Howard’s custom explosives. 

That cinematic moment when Captain America had fallen, and Steve’s heart had stopped in his chest for three breathless beats, until Melville told the world with Cap was on his feet again. The rallying of a Ranger battalion that had gotten themselves pinned on the beach. The blue gloved hand that had reached down to pull the first Ranger up off his rope ladder, and onto the beachhead proper. Captain America and his Commandos, capturing German pillboxes. The closing of the gap between Omaha and Gold beaches.

The wind had whipped heavy through Melville’s broadcast, and at times crackled when a German shell landed close by. It had felt almost as though Steve had been there himself.

“What now?” Dugan says, and Steve looks down towards the water, at the tens of thousands of soldiers streaming onto the continent.

He smiles, and says, “They’ll find a use for us.”

 


	12. Chapter 12

 

The Army does and doesn’t. They receive word on D+2 that Colonel Phillips will be en route to them from New York, and they’re to stay put and await further instruction. So they wait, while the front lines roll forward. Dugan finishes a set of socks for each man in their unit, and two for Steve. A whole bundle of letters from home arrives on a resupply ship, and Steve surrenders seven illustrations from his sketchbook to send back to Bucky’s sisters. Cherbourg is liberated.

They stay busy; the war is still going on, even as they twiddle their thumbs in Normandy. Used to carrying secrets, they work with their Resistance contacts to ferret out nests of collaborators, and to carry messages between towns. Caen is liberated. The Allies roll on towards Paris, and west towards the Siegfried line. 

Morita comes to Steve early one morning, while gray ghosts of mist blend with faraway smoke. Contrails in the sky burn away beneath the rising sun. Its heat has also begun to loosen the obdurate knot of phlegm in his throat, but he still clears it while waiting for Morita to speak. 

“We’re to make our way to Chartres by noon. The RAF plans to hit them at sixteen hundred hours.”

Steve informs the others of their mission, which is to warn the town of their impending destruction. He explains the rest of what they know: “Colonel Griffith has done what we couldn’t do in Italy and figured out Chartres isn’t an observation post for the Germans. So we get to go and warn them they’re going to get hit, and help with the evacuation.”

They fear at first that the German-controlled town will put up a fight but it turns out the leadership has already fled, moved by rumors of Captain America.

The French mayor of Chartres takes the news of the bombing with equanimity, presented in awkward French by Captain America holding his cowl apologetically in one hand. Steve has come to respect the French for their silent acceptance of the fire rained down on their country. Razed countryside that they must feel as strongly as if the fields were a part of themselves. He can see Dernier brace himself sometimes, taking deep draughts of air as if preparing for bodily pain, when the planes above gracefully let go their bombs. 

There’s a huge and ancient cathedral at Chartres with Gothic spires and a greened copper roof that Bucky informs him is the exact color of the Statue of Liberty. “Which was French,” Dernier adds. It has windows that appear like narrowed eyes from afar. Inside they are stained glass that filter light through in colors Steve can only guess at, though he had seen shades of a particular vivid blue among them. Gabe stares in awe and asks questions of the workmen who scramble up tall ladders to remove the windows from their metal settings. The blue, he informs Steve, is called  _ bleu de Saint-Denis _ . No one knows how the original artists created the color. The Commandos help townspeople pack the windows in crates of straw and move them down to the Church basement. It feels like carrying sarcophagi for entombment.

The Chartres cathedral, blinded of its windows, stands ready for the oncoming bombs. They move through the evacuated town. Steve sees Bucky sling an arm around Morita when they pass a discarded toy car, a wooden contraption, and a wagon that holds someone’s phonograph apparently deemed too heavy for removal. The two of them talk for a moment and then wheel the phonograph back into the lee of the nearest house, hopefully shaded from bombs. They jog to catch up with the rest of them and then they leave Chartres behind. Silent phonograph and eyeless church and the hidden  _ bleu de Saint-Denis _ .

That’s a successful mission. 

 

-

 

There are other missions, other towns. A little village near Caen, notable only for not having been blown to hell and back during the leadup to Overlord. They go with an escort of soldiers, all volunteers, all smiles. The escort sits in the shade while Captain America, Dugan, Gabe, Monty, and Dernier climb up on top of a tank (a real one has been spared for the purpose), and are filmed driving through the narrow cobblestone streets. Their volunteer guard is eager to be chosen as extras in the film, which the director tells Steve will be distributed in full through the Navy’s library, and clips shown in the newsreels for the good folks back home. The title will be  _ Captain America and his Howling Commandos _ , after the sound their weapons made on D-Day.

As soon as they’d arrived, Jim and Steve found a nice patch of grass and mostly intact wall to lean against, neither of them expecting to be asked up onto the tank. Gabe has been given a spot right next to Captain America, as the Germans lately have been using the treatment of Negroes in America as part of their own propaganda. Dugan is on Bucky’s right, beaming broadly beneath his mustache.

French citizens line up, and when signaled throw flowers at Captain America. The first time Bucky smiles and catches one. The second and third takes he sits unsmiling, his jaw set square and tight. Dernier throws kisses to the crowd. Monty waves like his queen, also unsmiling.

 

 

“What’re you drawing?” Jim asks, his eyes closed. 

“We might as well be with the USO show,” Steve mutters, his neck bent over his sketchpad. He brushes eraser shavings off the paper, and they’re lost among the grass. “Kissing babies. Selling bonds.”

Yesterday, a train had left Paris carrying over two thousand political prisoners, including American airmen captured during the Overlord invasion. No one was sure where they had been sent. Paris was striking against their occupiers. Thirty miles south from the little village Captain America was pretending to liberate, German troops were streaming east through Falaise, trying to outrun an Allied pincer trip. Tens of thousands of Germans were reported killed already, littering a flattened countryside with corpses.

Jim cracks one eye open, casts it sideways towards Steve. “You wanna be on the front instead?” he asks.

“I want the war to end,” Steve says, and lets his head thump back against the stone. “Not to be relegated to the side show again. We’re  _ so close _ to ending all of this - we should be doing more than saving church windows.”

Jim opens his other eye and stares outward with silent discontent. They watch the director step forward to confer with the ‘actors’ on the tank. After a moment Gabe steps down, and they set up the shot again. The tank rolls over the rough cobblestones. The villagers throw flowers to their liberators. 

“Thought this was the ‘most important battlefield of all’,” Jim says. 

“When it was fake,” Steve says. “These men believe Captain America’s real.”

Jim snorts. “Don’t you?”

When Steve doesn’t say anything to that, he leans over and digs a pack of cigarettes out of his back pocket. The smell of the match strike is sour over the sweet smell of grass and old stone.

They let Bucky off the tank while they set up the next shot, and he comes over to put Jim and Steve’s shady wall physically between him and their escorts, several of whom have told the camera crew they signed up after seeing Captain America’s posters around their neighborhood.  _ He’ll Never Quit! And Neither Shall We! _ And then they’d mugged the look of their favorite, pointing sternly at an invisible, insufficiently patriotic audience. 

“So how’s being a movie star?” Jim asks, tipping his chin back to look up at Bucky, whose elbows are braced on the wall between them.

“I didn’t like it at first,” he says, shrugging.

“How about now?” Steve asks.

“I’m still on first,” Bucky replies, and takes a deep draught from his canteen, wiping water off his mouth with the back of one gloved hand. 

Steve laughs. He turns his notepad so Bucky can see: a great shaggy bear, his fur poking out like straw from under Captain America’s helmet, bunched lumpily into the costume, one paw up in a crisp salute. The bear is smoking a cigarette. 

Bucky snorts - a beautiful, undignified sound. He brings a gloved hand down to thread into Steve’s hair, give him a rough little shake. He smooths Steve’s hair afterwards, still staring down at the bear. _“A beser zelner vi mir,”_ he says, and Jim says, “Bless you.”

 

-

 

Colonel Phillips arrives with a complete absence of fanfare, as usual. Steve is on his way to the mess with Dugan when a private comes up and requests Captain Rogers’ presence. He addresses this to Dugan, as if he’s blind to the number of bars on each of their uniforms.

Phillips has commandeered someone else’s tent. When Steve pushes the heavy flap aside he’s staring fixedly down at a map of the border between northern France and Germany, with a little train of markers leading up through Belgium and the Netherlands - almost, but not quite paralleling the heavy red line of German defence. “At ease, Rogers,” Phillips says, but then he smiles. They hadn’t gotten along at first; the man had been issued, not born, and though he’d been enthusiastic about combat deception as a theory, he was used to commanding, as he’d put it, ‘real soldiers.’ But Phillips had come around eventually. 

They shake, and Phillips claps a heavy hand on Steve’s shoulder. 

“We’re bypassing the Seigfried line?” Steve asks, nodding his chin at the map.

“That’s the plan,” Phillips says, “up and over the garden wall. Should have the whole thing buttoned up by Christmas.” 

“I remember that from ‘42,” Steve says, and adds, “Sir.”

“I remember that smart mouth on you,” Phillips says, and Steve bounces a little on his toes, eager. But he’s not there to put Steve’s unit on their next assignment, or rather, he is: he’s there to send them home.

For a moment Steve thinks that Phillips is joking. The silence stretches, and Steve’s nervous smile, only half there to begin with, drops off his face. “Sir,” he says, “you gotta be kidding me.”

“Is this the face of a man who would kid you?” Phillips asks. He sits down behind the desk, looking balefully at the little signs of personality littered across it: a woman’s photograph, paperwork that’s been doodled upon. “Your unit’s been reassigned,” he says. “You’re going to Washington to shake hands and pose for nice pictures. Well, Barnes’ll be posing, anyway. Can’t imagine you’d look as friendly to the camera.”

“We could be of use in the Netherlands,” Steve protests, “for - for falsifying landings of the paratroopers, or - Captain Fox’s unit moved out directly after the landings, to obscure troop movements for the 9th Infantry. My men could join up with another deception unit at the front, and -”

“Your men,” Phillips says, “could use some rest. How about a few weeks in Paris before you ship home? I hear it’s nice this time of year.”

“We’re fine,” Steve says. “We’re well-rested.”

Philips quirks an eyebrow. “I’m sure you are,” he says. He leans back in his chair. “Took me some time go through all of your mission reports, you know. Almost as long as it took my team back at the SSR to write up suitable fictions to submit on Captain America’s behalf. A few times we actually had to  _ tone down _ the heroics to make it more believable.” He shakes his head. “Participating in a full scale invasion - against orders, yes I did hear all about that, no I do not want your excuses - after months of performing commando raids in hostile territory -”

“So you’re approving all of my promotion requests?” Steve asks, mulish.

The other eyebrow goes up, and Phillips says, measured, “Point is, your unit has done their part. Getting our feet on the continent was always going to be the hardest part, and now that we’ve done it, the rest is a job for infantry. The war is over, Rogers.”

“All due respect, I don’t believe it is,” Steve says, through his teeth. Outside the tent, it’s started raining again. The air tastes thick and muddy with it. It’s quiet, in the camp; all of the soldiers left a long time ago, and what’s left over are people busy with phone calls and telegraphy, directing the passage of men arriving from England and into the European continent, and then back out again on stretchers or in bags.

Phillips is watching Steve closely, his hands steepled in front of his chin. “This isn’t a punishment,” he says. “Your unit has performed above and beyond the expectations placed upon it. Your unredacted reports have been reviewed by General Eisenhower himself. The reassignment is his decision, and where he feels Captain America would be most useful.”

Steve is silent. Phillips holds his gaze, solemn and shadowed in the dim tent. He says, “Cap’s a hero to the American public. Bond sales take a ten percent bump in every state the USO show visits. Enlistment takes a jump too. The War Activities Committee is coordinating with RKO for a fourth full length picture. He’s a success on all fronts, Rogers. The Germans have been throwing thousands of Reichsmarks at anyone who thinks they can figure out how to engineer Erskine’s serum. Even the Russians want their own super soldier; they made one hell of an offer to Stark about it. Surprised he didn’t accept, actually.”

“Stark doesn’t need the money,” Steve says, and Phillips shrugs.

“Or he knows it’s impossible, and doesn’t want the black mark on his record,” he says, and sighs. “More’s the pity, we were hoping he could pick up where Erskine left off.”

“I think this is a mistake,” Steve says.

“I know you do,” Phillips says, but softly, soft enough that Steve looks up from where he’s been studying the dirty tips of his too-big galoshes, the tips stuffed full with torn up Army guidebooks. “Think big picture, Rogers. I know you’ve got it in you. Think about every politician who wants to get a photo of themselves shaking Cap’s hand, authorizing new funds for the war effort first. We’ve got all the warm bodies we could want; what we  _ need _ is gasoline, and bullets, and new coats and boots for the winter. Same thing the Germans need, and if we get there first we can starve them out. This is what winning a war looks like, Rogers.”

That cold calculation again, which feels as cold as the wind when Steve steps out of Phillips’ tent, his galoshes sticking immediately in the thick mud. He curses a bit, and then bites his tongue, hard enough to sting: he doesn’t want to give Phillips the satisfaction. He’d made himself bleed this way, a couple times. The last time it happened, Bucky’d made him stick his tongue out as far as he could to get a look at it and said, “Maybe it’d better if you just bit the damn thing off.”

There, waiting for Steve, is Bucky himself: head bowed over his cigarette, mouth open and soft. A thinking look, he used to call it, laughing when Steve called him names over that slacked-jawed expression. He smiles when he sees Steve, his whole face wrinkling up with it. “You look like a little thundercloud,” he says.

“That’s funny,” Steve says. “You oughta take that show on the road.” 

They walk together away from the cluster of command tents. Bucky matches Steve’s pace easily, unhurriedly. Unmindful of the bit of rain that’s falling on their shoulders. “I can’t figure it,” Bucky says, after a while.

“Figure what?”

“Whether I’m gonna like what’s got your panties up in a knot,” Bucky answers, and Steve reaches up and boxes his ear. He can hardly outrun Bucky, but he makes it a few furious steps before one of Bucky’s long arms comes and hauls him back close. His fingers are cold on the back of Steve’s neck, threaded into Steve’s collar. Steve’s hands stay fisted at his sides, and after a moment Bucky releases him, though he doesn’t step away. He stays right where he is, the barest bit of heat reaching through the layers of Steve’s uniform. 

He studies Steve’s face closely, and then says, “They’re sending us home.” He says it softly, disbelieving, and then again when Steve doesn’t say anything: “They’re sending us home?”

Steve’s throat is aching. Damn Bucky, anyway; he’d always been the smart one, out of the two of them. “You’re going to Wichita after all - or Washington, at least,” Steve says, and adds, spitefully, “The one in Maryland. That’s south of Jersey.”

Bucky rubs a hand over his mouth and looks away, blinking fast. “I know,” Steve says. “I told Phillips it was a mistake. We should be going to Germany.”

Bucky is silent for a long time. “Steve,” he says. “Didn’t we do enough?”

“I thought we did,” Steve says. 

Bucky’s jaw tightens. There’s rain in his hair and in the shadowy beginnings of a beard on his face. For a moment he gropes for the words, one hand fisting in his own hair while Steve looks up at him. His neck is starting to ache, from the angle. “Would it be so awful for you to just  _ live _ through this thing?” Bucky says, at last.

It’s the tone more than anything else that gives Steve pause, thick with real anger. “Uh,” Steve says, blinking at him stupidly, “I never thought about it.”

“I know you haven’t,” Bucky says. “You’re not gonna be satisfied until you get all of us killed.”

“I’m not trying to get anyone killed,” Steve says. “I’m not - Bucky, come on, this isn’t - Captain America’s worth  _ more  _ than this, than being stuck in some, some politician’s -” He flounders, but he can’t find the right words among all the revulsion he feels at the sheer, horrible  _ waste  _ of it all.

“Whatever you say, Cap,” Bucky says, and shakes his head. “Well, I’ll go tell the guys the bad news. I’m sure they’ll be as busted up over it as you are. You can start a letter writing campaign to protest the injustice.”

“Bucky, come on,” Steve says, but Bucky moves away, faster than Steve can follow.

“I thought about it,” he calls over his shoulder. “I thought about it plenty.”

 

 


	13. Chapter 13

 

Their camp is deserted by the time Steve returns, save for Dernier shaving determinedly in front of a tin mirror, his kit propped up on the rolled up side of his tent. “Bonjour, mon Capitaine,” Dernier says, smiling lopsidedly at the tin mirror. 

_“Où est tout le monde?”_ Steve asks. He ducks under the flap of his own tent, even though he can see no one’s inside. They have three of the small walls to themselves, with Monty, Dernier and Dugan squeezing into the last. They’re roomier than the pup tents they were sharing in the field, big enough to set your kit out properly instead of going to sleep with it under your head, although only Steve and Morita can stand upright in them. 

“They’ve gone to the,” Dernier says, but the rest of the sentence is lost to Steve’s incomplete French vocabulary.

“Soulagement?” Steve repeats.

Dernier frowns thoughtfully and says to himself, “Comment dites-vous? You know, the musical performance. The Americans are putting it on, over at the other camp.”

“You didn’t want to go?” Steve asks.

“Pah,” Dernier says, and rinses his face from the makeshift basin he’s made out of his helmet. “Why go see pretend women? Besides, English jokes aren’t as funny as French ones. Captaine, do you want to come with me to play poker tonight? My new friends in the Canadian camp, they have found cases and cases of the very best Cognac, that the Nazi bastards were keeping for themselves. I will teach you the French jokes.”

“Tempting,” Steve says, mostly to himself. He tugs off his muddy galoshes, to change them out for marginally drier boots. The galoshes were German, left behind in an abandoned shelter, picked up by Dugan while looting was still acceptable. He drops them on the floor of their tent, and then guiltily nudges them back up against the wall, where Bucky will line their boots up neatly anyway, each night before they go to sleep.

“Rogers,” Dernier says, and Steve flinches. _“Ça va?”_

“Fine,” he says, and then, “Jacques?”

Dernier tilts his head, waiting patiently for Steve to translate whatever it is he’s thinking about. He’s nicked himself just under the corner of his jaw, and stuck a bit of toilet tissue to the wound while it dries. 

“You ever think of visiting America?” Steve asks, finally. 

Dernier’s eyebrows climb towards his hairline, and fail to reach that high. “After the war?” he asks dubiously.

“Sure,” Steve says, and Dernier laughs.

“Maybe after the war, I will learn to think so far ahead,” he says.

The show’s already started by the time Steve finds a ride over to the other American encampment. It’s a narrow stage up on planks to keep it out of the mud, draped heavily with bunting. There are soldier-actors on stage as Steve squeezes in through the clustered groups of men to find his, waiting on line around the rough sketch of a barracks mess, trays in hand. One of them sidles up to the Cook but holds his tray close to his chest, peering down at the presumably empty pots. “Pardon,” he asks, in a genteel sort of voice. “Do you serve crabs here?”

“Oh, we serve anyone,” says the Cook, and pantomimes pouring a ladle full of slop onto the tray.

Dugan reaches over and thumps Steve on the back in greeting as Steve sits down. He gets a nod from Jim and Monty, a smile from Gabe, and no reaction at all from Bucky, who keeps his eyes on the show. “What the hell is this?” cries the Private, staring aghast down at his tray.

“It’s soup,” answers the Cook.

“What kind of soup?”

“Bean soup,” answers the Cook, this time with great dignity.

“I’m not asking what it’s been,” says the Private, “I’m asking what it is  _ now _ !”

“These jokes have whiskers on ‘em,” Steve says, leaning into Bucky’s side. He feels the muscles in Bucky’s shoulder shiver. If it were just the two of them, Buck would have leaned away, would have said whatever he’s thinking that’s making his teeth grind together. In front of the others ...

“Get up on that stage yourself, you think you can do better,” Bucky says, so quiet it almost sounds like a threat. Steve shakes his head.

“Come on,” he says, “I’m only funny  _ looking ._” 

That gets him a response, even if it’s just Bucky’s mouth twisting sideways. Steve nudges him again. Bucky lets him, lets Steve move him, listing sideways and back like a reed in the wind. The motion of it blends into the restless movements of the soldiers around them, the shuffling, burping, farting, laughing mass of them, all individuality lost to Steve’s astigmatism and officially discouraged, in any case. They’re far back enough that the stage blurs for Steve too: the yellow-brown bunting that he assumes is red-white-blue, the actors more shapes than anything else.

Look at the big picture, Phillips said.

“You think anyone’s come up with a Captain America bit yet?” Bucky asks.

Steve considers it: the seven of them in a can-can line up on stage, high stepping. They could put it in the next movie, show it in all the forty-eight states. Dugan watching everyone else instead of his feet; Dernier laughing fit to burst. Monty holding on to his dignity with the skin of his teeth.

“Look,” the Private says on stage, “I can’t eat this garbage, call your Sergeant.”

“It’s no use,” Cook says. “He won’t eat it either.”

“Buck, do you -” Steve says haltingly, and stares down at his chapped, reddened hands, wrapped around his knees. The ground is cold and damp under his ass even if the rest of him is warm, nestled deep in the body heat of the soldiers around them. He doesn’t even know what Bucky told the others. If he told them anything at all. On Bucky’s other side, Morita’s paying more attention to cleaning his nails with a pocket knife than to the show. Dugan and Monty are passing a bottle of what smells like brandy between them. Gabe seems halfway asleep. No one looks like they want to start a letter writing campaign. Steve licks his lips, and tries again. “Bucky, if you think we -”

“Don’t,” Bucky says. He shakes his head. He doesn’t look at Steve. He’s watching the actors up on stage making their bows. The applause is half-hearted, the energy subdued. Steve digs his face into the cradle of his elbows and watches the crowd. They’ve been away from home long enough that he doesn’t recognize all of the unit patches, the snatches of songs that he hears around the camp sometimes, always at a distance. These men will move out from Normandy in orderly lines like ants, towards Reims, Bastogne, Malmedy, Aachen, driving the Germans before them. 

They look fresh, and Steve supposes they are. You need fresh troops to win a war. Sometimes it is only down to numbers.

The next act takes the stage: six fair maidens of varying splendor and body hair, with charming enough faces that Steve can believe someone on that stage knew their way around the makeup brushes. Gabe wakes up a little, and he and Bucky trade elbow jabs and smiles around Steve’s back. That had been how they’d met, whirling around the dance floor at the Hamilton Lodge Faggots Ball. Mabel May’s skill, of course, far exceeded that of the ladies of this chorus - one of which had forgotten to shave before showtime.

The other fellows in the artist outfit had put on a lot of shows at Pine Camp, back when Steve and Gabe were still in training. They’d usually been better outfitted than this one, with men darting down to New York City on furlough to pick up whatever sequins or satin they could get ahold of. Steve had heard of a whole network of skirts and dresses and padded brassieres being passed from base to base, all the way through the Pacific and back: nothing, apparently, lifted the spirits of the soldier quite like a Carmen Miranda costume.

Bucky smiles for the first time all night, watching the girls and their clumsy high kicks up on stage. He’d always liked the pansy balls, even though Steve had never known Bucky’s eye to catch on a skirt unless it was one of their kind wearing it. He’d moped for weeks when Rockland Palace had finally called it quits on the Faggots Ball, and refused to be comforted by the fêtes at Webster Hall. 

Had it been the spectacle? Steve remembers asking, one night where Bucky had just sighed despondently at the idea of going out. The forbidden thrill of mixed race dancing? (A spiteful question; by that point Gabe and Bucky had long called it quits and become friends instead.) Bucky had shrugged, a little angrily - like he hadn’t known the answer himself, or like he could smell Steve’s lingering jealousy. 

“They’ll never make one as big,” he’d said, and turned away.

Steve looks around, his nose still buried in his sleeves, his knees tucked up against his chest. Everyone around them is smiling too, big and genuine. There never had been anything quite as glorious as the Faggots Ball, which had been stuffed full of masculine women and feminine men ( _ however to tell the rooster from the hen? _ ) but also the opposite: the normal men and women, drawn by the glamor and drama, enchanted by the genius of artifice. They’d swelled the room, packed the hall full, and nearly brought down the house with their applause.

The applause in France is quieter, but sweet: when the girls make their way off the stage it’s to wolf whistles and blown kisses, as fervent as any given to the USO girls Steve remembers from back home. Bucky softens, enough that Steve risks leaning a little weight on him. His whole body shakes as Bucky claps. 

Later, they undress in the dark. There are two cots in their tent, one against each wall, and they keep them apart for appearances. At night Bucky moves his cot flush against Steve’s and they fold into each other as best they can, piling up any clean clothes beneath them to try and pad out the wooden rods that run through the center of their makeshift bed. Each morning he moves it back as mindlessly as he does everything before he’s truly awake, which in Brooklyn was about his third cup of coffee and in Europe is right around  _ never _ : that sleepy, far away-ness banished only when someone is shooting at them, or when his eyes are shadowed by Captain America’s cowl. Or now, Steve supposes; Bucky could be wearing any expression at all.

He waits, shivering in his clothes, while Bucky tidies up. He listens. The heels of Steve’s galoshes click together as they’re set against the wall. The soft rustle of clothes being folded and laid on top of Steve’s pack. The creak of the cot as Bucky settles into it, rolling Steve nearly on top of himself almost by accident as his weight shifts their center of gravity.

He’s bare chested. Steve threads his fingers through the hair that covers Bucky’s chest. Bucky’s hands go around his waist, nudge up under his clothes to find skin to rub warmth into. He smells of cigarettes and campfire smoke, and underneath that the faint smell of shaving soap. Steve butts his head up against Bucky’s jaw and rubs like a cat, feeling the scratch of beard against his skin. He traces the jut of ribs and muscle, the width of Bucky’s shoulders. 

“So what would you do?” he asks. His hands are on Bucky’s face, thumb rubbing over the prickly hair, looking for the familiar dip in his chin. 

“What?” Bucky asks. He sounds half asleep already, drugged.

“What would you do?” Steve says again. His voice is half a rumble, pitched low even though their tent is surrounded already by snoring, like the sound of waves. 

“Go to sleep,” Bucky breathes, brushing his lips against Steve’s forehead. Steve waits, and after a moment Bucky relents. He sighs, lifting Steve high enough that the blanket slips down their shoulders. Cold air on the back of his neck. He says, “I think I’d travel.”

He says, “Only places I’ve ever been in my life are New York, Army bases, and here. Been carrying that damn flag on my chest for almost a year now and I’ve hardly even seen the place.” 

His arms tighten around Steve. He says, quieter, “They probably pay Captain America enough, we could do that for a while. See where the trains take us.”

Steve’s eyelashes brush against the skin of Bucky’s throat. “Oh,” he says. “I’m going with you?”

“Sure,” Bucky says. There’s a tremble in his arms. “You ain’t been anywhere either. Only time you went west of the Hudson was -” 

“ - lying to the Army recruiters in Jersey,” Steve says.

He feels Bucky laugh, more than he can actually hear it: as a shudder, quickly gone. “Yeah,” Bucky says. “Yeah, you crazy bastard. But don’t worry. You’ll like it. We’ll see everything great the country’s got to offer.”

“Yeah?” Steve asks, and lifts his head a little, enough that he can look towards the wet shine of Bucky’s eyes, colorless in the dark. “What’re we gonna do with the rest of the afternoon?”

Bucky’s arms tighten. His lips are hot against Steve’s, hard over the square shape of his teeth, wet where they fumble in the dark, kissing each other’s cheeks and noses by accident. He’s cradled between Bucky’s legs, pinned by his arms. If they were at home - if they were in a  _ bed _ \- Bucky would roll both of them over and strip Steve mercilessly out of his clothes, pretending he didn’t know laying flat was easier on Steve’s crooked spine. 

They make do. They take off only the necessary clothes, which are bundled underneath their bodies for more padding on the cot. They go slow - to keep quiet, keep the cot from tipping over, and keep the wool blanket off Steve’s bare ass, which will give him hives. Bucky plants his feet up on the cot, his broad hands restless over Steve’s back until the way is eased and they’re fucking smoothly, deeply. Mostly Steve holds on: to Bucky’s hair, his face, one hand slipping down through the hole at the corner of the cot. His dick trapped between their bellies, rubbing, slick with sweat and heat. His knees pressing against their balled-up uniforms. His thighs spread wide and bruising over Bucky’s hips. 

 

 

For a long time after Bucky holds on. His mouth is open against the nape of Steve’s neck. His breath is hot against Steve’s skin. Steve lets him do it, sinks body deep. Listens to the steady rise and fall of Bucky’s lungs and heart, nestled between Steve and the cold canvas of the cot. For once his own heartbeat matches, keeping the rhythm like a good soldier on the march. The sudden cessation of pain is like a drug, like a dream, like he’s been dropped in the body of a stranger. Sex is an astonishment: a few minutes where all Steve feels is  _ good _ .

He drifts, but he doesn’t dream. He smells the old, sour smell of their blankets, the funk of sex. He feels the callouses on Bucky’s hands, and the ache underneath his left shoulder blade. Bucky’s throat makes clicking noises as he swallows, and his joints click too as he folds himself more tightly around Steve. The sound of snoring soldiers remains just that.

“You okay?” Bucky asks, hushed.

“No,” Steve says, confused, and then, “Yeah. Yeah, Buck. I’m okay.”

 

-

 

“Cap? Cap, are you awake?”

Steve’s fingers twitch. His arm is numb where it’s lying across two wooden bars, reaching over towards the other empty cot. The blanket is pulled high around his shoulders. There’s cold air leaking in under it. His eyes open, blink, find the huddled shape of Bucky Barnes, crouched in the corner of their tent.

The crinkle of his bare feet on the tarp underneath them. The canvas flap whispers as it’s folded back. More cold air. “Yeah, we’re - Gabe, what’s -”

“It’s Peggy, she’s found -” 

And a hand on Steve’s shoulder, shaking him roughly. 

“You need to come now.”

 

-

 

“Two weeks ago, I received information of a convoy of prisoners diverted to an unknown Hydra camp in Austria,” Peggy says. Her hair is pulled tightly back from her face. Her lips are no color in particular. She’s grimy with travel. 

“There’s lots of camps,” Dugan says. He rubs both hands over his face, emerging with mustache rumpled. Morita’s cheeks are red with pillow lines. “What’s so special about this one?”

Phillips’ uniform is hastily buttoned. The creases are still in it from how he hangs his blouse up at night. There’s a stack of photographs in front of him, dropped hastily on the desk and not tidied up. It’s early enough that they’ve lit the gas lamps, which hiss quietly in the corner of Phillips’ big tent.

“My source is... looking to curry favor,” Peggy says. “This base is quite secret. The location is very remote. Aerial surveillance of the area turns up nothing. I don’t know that we would have found the place otherwise.” 

They wait. On Steve’s right, Gabe sits tense and silent. Peggy’s too disciplined to have told him anything about what she’s found, but the look in her eyes … 

She tells them, “My source turned over documents - requests for prisoners to be sent to this particular camp. They reference personnel we thought disappeared in ‘43.”

Steve’s head jerks up. “Arnim Zola,” he says, and next to him Bucky flinches. Peggy nods.

“The SSR raided the camp last week,” she says. “It seems Dr. Zola has been busy continuing Hydra’s efforts to replicate Doctor Erskine’s formula. At this site and potentially others.”

“Did he - did he succeed?” Bucky asks. Steve looks over at him, but Bucky’s staring straight ahead. He looks focused, ready. Jaw set. Like his voice hadn’t trembled when he spoke.

“We don’t know,” Peggy says, and sighs. “As far as the SSR is aware, you are our only survivor of his experiments, Sergeant Barnes.”

Bucky reaches for the photographs and turns them over. The stack is close enough that Steve can see what Bucky’s looking at, the grainy black and white. The stark lines of a wrought iron gate, the Nazi eagle on top, the Hydra squid flanking it. The operating table, smashed glass and overturned cabinets around it, as if they’d been caught in the middle of destroying the evidence. Soldiers standing in front of a long, deep trench. There’s dirt piled high behind them, clumpy with snow. In the trench, also dusted with snow, are skinny, bleached limbs. Trunks bare of branches. A hand outstretched.

Gabe sucks in a breath. Bucky hands the photographs to Steve. The weight of eyes on Steve’s shoulders as the rest of their unit waits their turn to see and witness. Steve straightens his spine along the rigid back of the chair. “What do you need us to do?” 

“Our men are standing guard over the camp,” Peggy says. “We sealed the site immediately once we understood what we were looking at.”

“Coordination with the Russians has opened up a train route through the Alps,” Phillips says, “but it should go without saying that they can’t be allowed to get their hands on any of Zola’s work. Anything that looks important or that you recognize,” - this he says directly to Bucky - “should be catalogued and brought back directly to the SSR for transport to London. I’d like Stark to take a look at it.”

Bucky’s still staring at the photographs, which have made their way to Gabe’s hands. A muscle in his jaw jumps. “If he managed it,” Bucky says, and then nothing else. A muscle in his jaw jumps.

“That’s what we need to know, Sergeant,” Phillips says. “Or if he’s gotten any closer than our men have. Lives depend on it.”

Bucky shakes himself, and raises his head to meet Phillips’ eyes. “Yessir,” he says. 

But he catches Steve’s arm as they’re leaving Phillips’ tent and tows him in the opposite direction of their campsite, almost too fast for Steve to keep pace. His grip on Steve’s bicep is relentless, painful - relinquished only when Steve yanks hard enough Bucky actually notices. 

“What’s,” he starts to say:  _ what’s the matter with you _ , but stops at the look on Bucky’s face. It’s creeping towards dawn, and the round whites of Bucky’s eyes shine in the gray gloomy light. “What is it, Buck?” he says, and puts a hand on Bucky’s wrist even though there are soldiers around who might see them. He’s trembling.

“Steve,” Bucky says. “Steve, there’s something -”

“What?” Steve asks, bewildered. He watches that muscle jump in Bucky’s jaw. “I didn’t have anything to do with this, Buck. I thought we were getting leave too. You want me to say sorry? Look, when we’re back from Austria I’ll talk to Phillips, see if they - if they still want to send us home. Alright?”

Bucky laughs, and rubs a hand over his mouth. Stays like that for a second, his eyes shut tight, hand pressing hard over his face. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, alright.”

 

 


	14. Chapter 14

 

They’re stuck at the border for four days while the OSS sorts out transport; neutrality means that Switzerland will shoot down Allied planes as well as German ones. They twiddle their thumbs in a fairy tale wonderland, which is a feeling multiplied when they finally reach Bern. The streets are cobblestone and winding; the buildings dusted with snow so pure it looks like powdered sugar. It’s a city of church spires and Swiss clocks, and looks as though it’s swept clean for their arrival

In Bern is another delay; snow has come early in the high mountains that crowd around the city, and the Austrians haven’t been maintaining the train tracks as well as the Germans were. They’d spent their days at the border cleaning guns and doing any repairwork, so Steve releases his men to see the sights, which include a sprawling pit in the old city where bears have been kept for more than four hundred years. 

For once, Bucky is their de facto translator. Gabe is tied up with Peggy, coordinating between the OSS and their grudging contact in Austria. The Swiss look askance at his Brooklyn-and-Yiddish flavored German, but thaw long enough to sell them heavy, yellow wedges of cheese at exorbitant prices, which taste like toffee when Steve bites into one. 

The bears are less than impressive, huddled up in furry brown balls at the other side of the pit. None of them look as though they’d like to help carry munitions or ride around on a bicycle, which in Switzerland have tires made of cork, as rubber hasn’t been available in the country for some years. 

It’s the first time since they left England that they’ve walked on streets unscathed by bombing, and the people hurrying by are civilians, on their way to civilian work and back to their civilian homes. 

It’s a relief when their transport arrives.

 

-

 

The last leg of their journey is by train, winding through the thin air of the Alps. The windows are covered by blackout cloth, and the horsehair seats smell of long winters and heavy use ferrying troops of one nation or another. They set up camp in one of the rear cars and sleep an artificial sleep, like the little birds that Bucky’s mother keeps. 

Outside are mountains that defy scope and understanding, like standing at the foot of the Empire State Building and craning your neck to see the top. They rise jaggedly into the clouds. Snow doesn’t fall but tumbles glacier-like into valleys and clear lakes and rivers. Steve and Gabe sketch for hours, taking turns lifting the curtain so they can see the splendor passing by. When night falls they sketch each other, their friends, and the soldiers from the platoon that have been assigned to them - who are more interested in befriending Captain America than wondering why he and his commandos would want a guard to a nowhere base in Austria. 

One man has a German-made gun, a sniper’s rifle that is better than most of theirs. Bucky examines it with grudging appreciation and hands it back to a man who asks him if he, Captain America, can sign the butt of it. Bucky does. Carves CAP into the stock with a penknife. It’s not quite kissing babies in Wichita.

It feels, just a little, like New York: the shake of the train, the smell of someone else’s body too close. The ache in Steve’s back of being almost, almost home - just a few more stations to go.

Steve falls asleep sitting up, his cheek pressed against the hard plates of Captain America’s armor, and wakes up with Peggy sitting on his other side, reading a comic book by the thin light of dawn coming through a crack in the curtains. He stays still, breathing deep the warm air trapped between his nose and the thick scarf wrapped around his face, hoping blearily to fall back asleep.

He doesn’t realize that Bucky is also awake until he speaks.

“So what does Phillips want with the bodies?”

His voice is pitched low. Quiet enough that it wouldn’t have woken Steve if he hadn’t already been swimming somewhere near consciousness. “I’m not sure what you mean,” Peggy says. Her voice is whisper quiet, unrocked by the train. Bucky might have asked some question about the comic she’s reading, if not for the stiff, carefully held line of her body.

“Come on, Carter,” Bucky says. “You know what he asked me to do.”

Peggy is silent for a long time, long enough that Steve starts to come awake for real. Most of his body is covered by Bucky’s thick blue coat, his knees by both of their wool blankets. Under the coat, Bucky’s arm is wrapped around Steve’s waist. Steve breathes shallowly and tries to stay limp as the train jostles them. It’s not normally enough to sham Bucky, but he doesn’t seem to notice: his hand stays loose over Steve’s hip, his thumb stroking the seam of Steve’s blouse.

“What do you remember of being in Dr Zola’s care?” Peggy asks finally.

Bucky’s fingers clench. He lets go quickly, smoothing his hand over Steve’s hip even though he’d gripped nothing but fabric. He says nothing, and Peggy says, “Your report left quite a bit to the imagination.”

“I put in everything important,” Bucky says.

Peggy hums noncommittally. She turns the page of her comic. Captain America stands astride the bodies of fallen Nazis, shield in hand. The letters scream, ON TO BERLIN! She says, “Why do you think you survived, Sergeant Barnes?”

“Cuz he wasn’t finished,” Bucky says immediately. “The formula wasn’t complete.”

“Wasn’t it?” Peggy asks. She’s looking down at the comic, her hair obscuring her face from Steve’s slitted eyes. Her fingernails gleam on the page. “Dr Erskine seemed to think it was.”

Bucky’s hand is in a fist again, thumb rubbing fitfully. “But it,” he says, “it isn’t - real. This serum business. It’s not real.” 

“Of course it isn’t,” Peggy says, and snaps the comic book closed. Her red fingernails roll it tight enough to curl her hair with. “I had great admiration for Dr Erskine, but the poor man died in service of a fantasy. Zola is one of the highest ranking Hydra agents we’re aware of, who could lead us straight to Johann Schmidt. When I came to Phillips with this intelligence, I imagined he’d would want to pick up Zola’s trail, not send valuable assets to inspect his leavings.”

She blows an irritated breath through her nose, but then visibly composes herself. Her hands loosen around Captain America’s throat. “I understand they want to get to Zola’s research before the Russians do,” she says slowly. “But I don’t understand how anyone reasonable could take these -” she shakes the comic, “ - as gospel.”

“Wishfulness,” Bucky says.

“Yesmanship,” Peggy says disdainfully. “A few heads at the top start to believe their own lies, and no one down the chain has the guts to tell them that super soldiers are just as impossible as any of Hitler’s arcane treasure hunts.” 

“Well, we don’t suffer from that here,” Bucky says softly, his voice a quiet echo of Monty’s Oxford drawl. “Nothing but insubordination and bright ideas, here in the Howling Commandos.”

Peggy smiles at him. She settles back into her seat and unrolls the comic book, smoothing out the curled edges as if in apology. “There was a double agent I knew,” she says. “Very sensible, careful man, except for one thing. He kept a ring belonging to his mistress with him at all times. He explained to me once that he needed it. He  _ truly believed _ that this ring would keep him safe.” 

She’s quiet for a moment, thoughtful. It feels like her eyes are on Steve, though she hasn’t moved: her hair still tumbling down around her shoulders, her gaze still fixed on the pages held between her hands. “It’s quite easy to be taken in by superstition. Especially in war. We want to believe that there is some sort of larger meaning in our actions, that there are ways to keep safe. The human mind looks for patterns, because otherwise -”

“Otherwise we’re just robbing graves,” Bucky says. “Otherwise we’re no better than they are.”

Peggy says nothing. The train moves over its tracks, relentless. Steve frowns into Bucky’s chest, forgetting for a moment that maybe they could see him over the collar of Bucky’s blue coat.

“That’s the thing about all this shadow business,” Bucky says. Peggy looks at him sharply, but the look on her face tells Steve nothing, and he can’t see Bucky’s expression without giving himself away. “Steve told me one time that people see faces in everything. You have to be careful about the patterns you paint. They’ll find eyes where they should be and aren’t, and end up shooting at nothing.”

“The mind abhors a vacuum,” Peggy says, carefully.

“Loves a good story, though,” Bucky says, abruptly lighter. “If Cap  _ is _ a good story. The movie I saw was pretty dry. Nothing but duty and country, country and duty. Not a lot of the, what d’you call, human interest.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Peggy says, and eases back a little in her seat. “He cuts a dashing figure on screen, at least. You’ll have to take it up with the writers when you’re back in the States.”

“It wouldn’t kill ‘em to put in some dancing,” Bucky says. “Hey, are we slowing down?”

They are. Bucky’s arm had tightened preemptively, though the change in momentum isn’t quite enough to throw even Steve off the seat. It’s barely enough to wake up the men around them, though he can hear who he thinks is Morita grumbling vaguely in the seat in front of them.

Light flickers over Steve’s face as Bucky reaches up, pulls back the dark curtain. “Take a few guys with you up to the front, see what it is,” Steve says into his chest, adds, “Sorry, Peggy,” when she jumps. He pulls his knees up towards his chest to let Bucky past, and his feet find something hard underneath them on the way back down. Cap’s helmet.

“Keep in contact,” Steve says, and throws it clumsily to Bucky.

“Yeah yeah,” Bucky mumbles, his eyeroll cut off as he pulls the helmet over his tousled hair. “It’s probably just a branch on the tracks or something.”

Morita throws a hat at him when roused so Bucky, laughing, takes a handful of their eager guard with him to the front. When the heavy door slides closed behind them it’s quiet, an uncomfortable quiet without the chug of train wheels or the tick of a cooling engine or the warmth of Bucky beside him. Steve pulls the coat up around his shoulders and shifts around a little, but he can’t get comfortable. He pulls the window open to see what he can see, which isn’t much. The whole world is no color in particular. Steve huffs a breath through his nose and lets the curtain close.

“Were you awake the whole time?” Peggy asks him, a little wry.

Steve twists to look at her. “No,” he says, and offers her half a smile. “Just woke up.”

Next to Steve, the walkie talkie crackles. “Gunfire at the front of the train,” Bucky says. “Someone shot at the guys clearing the tracks. No one’s hurt, though. They’re trying to figure out where the shots are coming from.”

“Shouldn’t we be out of Switzerland by now?” Peggy asks, irritated.

“They’re German guns,” Bucky says, and Peggy and Steve look at each other. Even though they’ve never taken fire from the Swiss, they’ve all heard enough German guns by now to know the sound of them in their sleep. “Why don’t you guys send some -” he says. The radio crackles, whiting out whatever else Bucky’s saying, but Steve’s mind is already leaping ahead, mapping out the terrain he saw so briefly through the blackout curtains. 

“Formation up the left side of the train,” he says, and smiles. On their right would be a wide plateau, and then a sudden stop where the ground cut away into another deep, craggy valley; whatever Alpine majesty lay on the other side obscured by snow. But the dark shapes of men would stand like stark shadows to whoever had spotted the train’s approach; better to send an ambush up the left side, where they’d be sheltered between the train and the blank stone face of the mountain. 

Everyone is awake now, and mostly staring towards the front of the car, where Captain America isn’t anymore. Empty faces waiting for orders. Steve catches Monty’s eye, beckons him close. “Take Dernier and Gabe with you,” Steve tells him, and Monty nods. He takes the rest of their escort with him too, without needing to be told, without making it obvious that it’s the little guy giving the orders. They’d gotten good at that in the bocage, that smooth handoff. As much of a magic trick as any other they’ve performed: making a Negro, a Japanese, and at least one homosexual vanish into thin air. 

They never could manage it for Peggy, who sticks in the mind, who carries with her the lingering scent of perfume even doing nothing more than waiting patiently next to Morita for her own orders. “Go see if Cap needs a hand,” Steve tells the two of them. Morita nods, not expecting anything else; he’d shrugged the strap of the grease gun over his shoulders without bothering to put on a coat. 

They all flinch when Monty opens the exterior door and is immediately striped with snow, which crunches underfoot as each man jumps down. But when the last soldier is gone and the door closed, it’s there again, lingering in Steve’s mind: that odd quiet, the sudden emptiness of the room. It’s colder without all its sleeping bodies, but that’s not - 

Dum Dum’s needles click together, the man himself as unconcerned as if they’d sent their friends out to the corner store to buy bread. Knitting a scarf, maybe. Or the unexpected turn of yet another sock. The sound of the needles feel like cold fingers dancing up and down Steve’s spine and he shivers, restless. He shoves himself up and over to the end of the bench, has to stand all the way to get at their bags on the overhead rack. Gabe had had the map last -  _ ah _ .

Steve balances on one foot and then the other, folding the map down until he has Austria in his sights. His throat feels tight with the cold air Monty had let into the car, and his back aches with the early hour. He traces their route with a thumbnail thoughtfully, and presses the button down on the side of his walkie talkie. “Anyone have eyes on the Germans yet?” he asks. 

No reply. They should be miles from any towns or outposts. Could there be another camp nearby that Peggy’s contact hadn’t told them about? Their information had been that the Germans were turning towards the Russians and the rapidly approaching eastern front. Their transport had been secured easily, their escort added at Bern in an abundance of caution.

_ Click click _ . The map tells him nothing. He hits the button again, says into the walkie talkie, “Status report. Do you copy?”

He’s never able, later, to remember what saves him. If it was instinct that dropped him to the ground when the whole world exploded, or just sheer dumb luck. One moment he’s shifting his feet on the bench, one hand wrapped around the cold metal of the overhead rack, and the next he’s on the ground. The wind knocked out of him. Every muscle in his body tight and screaming. His mouth open against the muddy steel floor as the machine guns make another pass inches overhead:  _ ra-ta-ta-ta-ta. _

Echoing silence. As they change the clip, or watch for signs of life. Steve raises his head. Blood drips from his chin. His palms are burning, bleeding, mixing with the mud. “Dugan!” he yells, and his own voice is smothered in his ears, deafened by the guns. “ _ Dugan! _ ” 

A hand clamps around Steve’s ankle, and he twists to look, hand grabbing for a knife, a weapon - but it’s Dum Dum, bowler hat knocked off his head, staring wide and terrified but  _ unhurt _ . They clutch at each other for a moment in stunned silence, and then Steve gropes for the walkie talkie. It comes to life in his hand, in garbled British tones: “Rogers, do you copy? We’re taking fire from -”

_ Ra-ta-ta-ta-ta -  _

Steve tastes the floor again. Dugan’s hand jerks around his ankle like he’s being hit, but through slivered eyes Steve can see that the bullets aren’t coming low enough. Waist high if you were inside the train, so shoulders and head for the men outside. The car is criss-crossed with shafts of bright light, bullet holes in the blackout curtains. The cushions explode as they’re hit, ripped apart, horsehair puffing up into the air and drifting down to earth like feathers. 

Aiming from the front of the train towards the back, sweeping the whole length.  _ Bucky  _ \- 

“Repeat, taking fire from above,” Monty says again, and Steve can hear it through the radio: slow, unhurried rifle shots. “We’re pinned under the train. Multiple casualties. Rogers, come in. Barnes, do you copy?”

“Pops and I are unhurt,” Steve says, “What’s going on out there? Bu - Barnes, what’s your status?”

The radio crackles, louder this time: the muted, up-close sound of the microphone wired through Captain America’s helmet. The sound of labored breathing. “Someone’s coming,” Bucky says. He sounds strange, straining through the radio. His voice is thin and ragged. “Can’t see them yet. We’re in the second car. Casualties here - I need a medic.”  

“We’re in the third,” Morita says. “The doors are shot to hell in here, we can’t get any further.”

The air leaves Steve’s lungs like it’s been punched out of him, and for a moment that’s all there is. Raw, white panic. It arrives all at once, like a weight on his back, crushing. The feel of silty water and the drag of his wet uniform. The stupidity of a plan undone, how fast the world turns upside down.

He sees, very clearly, how they’ve been had. The ambushing left flank, sheltered by the train - shot like fish in a barrel from above. Everyone in the train pinned belly down on the ground by automatic fire. He didn’t have to send his soldiers out onto the exposed right side for them to be picked off one by one.

They didn’t have to believe in Captain America for someone else to. 

Tires crunch over snow. An engine cuts out, and then another. They’ve stopped shooting; it’s safe to approach, now that the reality of the situation is sinking in for anyone still alive. “It’s Hydra,” Monty says, “there’s a truck. Soldiers coming out. And a black V16. Three passengers.”

And Peggy, a faint gasp on the radio, “Schmidt.”

“Bucky, get out of there,” Steve says, urgently.

“They’re right outside the door,” Bucky hisses. “Steve, I’m - not going anywhere.”

It had been raining the day Peggy Carter saved the life of Bucky Barnes. It had been raining, and Peggy had said, “Wait, he should hear this,” when Steve had stood to go. Her eyes had darted towards him when she listed off the captured units, and his heart had hurt so badly he thought he’d about die on the spot. Standing outside Phillips’ tent afterwards in the rain, watching it drip off her curls. He hadn’t taken a full breath until he’d gone careening into Zola’s lab and heard, echoing in the dark room, “ _ Sergeant, three two five five -” _

And it’s Peggy, again, who saves them. 

“Steve,” she says, “Where is Jacques’ bag?” 

Steve’s eyes dart upward, toward the overhead rack. Up front, above the seat that Dernier and Monty and two other men had crammed into for the night. He can see the worn through leather strap, dangling down into the smoky space. “Fuck,” he says, forgetting to press the button so that Peggy can hear him.

He crawls. Belly down, elbows scraping over the worn steel floors. Dugan behind him whispering, “Rogers, what the fuck are you  _ doing _ ,” whispering, like Johann Schmidt himself can hear. The seconds where Steve gathers his arms and legs underneath him last for hours. One hand on the cracked seat, the other on the shredded back, one foot  _ up _ ,  _ reaching _ , and the strap is in his hand. He falls to land on his back, the bag cradled in his arms, and for one nightmare moment he’s sure he’ll be blown up instead of ripped apart by automatic fire, but nothing happens.

He chokes on air, trying to get his breath back. The radio’s still in his hand. “Monty,” he says into it when he can, “what’s the headspace under the train?”

“Not much,” Monty says. “Too low for us to move forward.”

“They’re coming in,” Bucky says. 

“It’ll be enough,” Steve says. “Buck, stall him. I’m coming.”

Dugan’s crawled his way up alongside Steve, that stupid hat jammed back on his head as if it’ll protect him. He jerks his chin towards the door. “What’s the plan, boss?” he asks, and blows great plumes of steam through his nose. There’s cold air leaking out from under the door, through the cracked windows. Steve’s lungs have never done well in the cold.

“I need you to cover me,” Steve tells him. “Get anyone you can back inside the train and keep their heads down.”

“But -” Dugan says, ready to argue. Ready to tip himself out into the snow right behind Steve, right into the crossfire. 

Steve smiles, and reaches out to grip Dugan’s shoulder. “Keep their eyes on you,” he says. “We’re going to need to move fast, to take out the Red Skull.”

He can see Dugan war with the order, wanting to argue that he’s never been able to hit the broadside of a barn with a rifle, that he’s not good for much but heavy loads and warm socks. What bursts out from under the mustache is, “Yes sir,” and “Be careful.”

Steve aims a careful boot at the door and kicks it open, slithering through as quick as he can manage. He only just makes it; snow puffs up behind as he rolls under the train. A moment later, the machine gun sweeps overhead again,  _ ra-ta-ta-ta-ta  _ echoing through the mountains. Glass from the windows fall to join the detritus underneath the train. Whoever’s signaling is taking their time. Keeping them distracted while Schmidt strolls right for Captain America.

The snow is stained with blood and oil. The smell of both crackles sharp and cold in Steve’s nose. He tucks his chin into the upturned collar of Bucky’s blue coat, breathing open mouthed to keep warm the air in his lungs. Bodies rest against the wheels of the train, flung about like dolls. He bumps his head against the undercarriage, pulls Dernier’s pack along behind him. 

Like animals, huddled soldiers stare at him. 

He crawls on his elbows, meets Monty halfway down the line, Gabe next to him, both of them wedged tightly into the cramped space, Dernier flat on his belly across the tracks. They reach for each other as best they can, steadying each other, making sure they’re all alive. 

“Get everyone as far back as you can manage,” Steve tells them, and lifts up the bag for them to see.  

“Merde alors,” Dernier says, and pulls the bag over to root through it, show Steve which ones will give him the biggest bang and how they’re triggered. The walkie talkie, tucked safe in the breast pocket of Bucky’s coat, makes a sound like the opening of a train door. And then -

Pistol shots don’t sound like much at a distance. Like the backfire of an old car or a book closed with particular force. They’re dull claps on the radio.  _ Bang. Bang. Bang _ . 

It’s Gabe’s eyes that Steve meets. Gabe who pulls roughly on Steve’s coat and says, “Go. Go.” Pulling him forward through the tunnel of soldiers and iron, towards the front of the train where Johann Schmidt is executing survivors instead of taking prisoners.

The microphone in Bucky’s helmet is particularly sensitive. Howard had developed it himself, a favor to an actress friend he wanted to get into bed, or at least that had been the story he’d told Steve. They’d wanted it to give Captain America stage cues, to feed him speeches - to let whoever was on the other side of the radio talk through him. 

So they all hear the Hydra troops screaming at Bucky,  _ Ergeben Sie sich! Waffe fallen lassen! _ . They hears Schmidt’s boots scrape across the floor, each step getting louder. 

“You are a difficult man to reach, Captain,” Schmidt says. 

“Yeah, well,” Bucky says, and spits. “You’re even uglier in person.”

“Carter,” Steve says into his radio, knowing Bucky is listening. “Can you see their position?”

Peggy’s voice cuts through the rattle of Bucky’s breathing, the thickness of Steve’s own. “Seven Germans in the car, including Schmidt. There’s a large pile of gear between Barnes and the front door, he can shelter behind if need be.” She hesitates. “Our other men are dead. Barnes is on the ground. I can’t see him very well. Barnes, were you hit?”

Bucky says nothing, but he can’t - not with Schmidt standing over him. If they absolutely needed Captain America alive they wouldn’t have shot his train full of holes, so: alive is best, but dead just as well. If they have any hope of keeping him that way, Schmidt can’t be allowed to realize they’re being overheard.

Steve measures time in railway ties. His arms and stomach are numb through, his nose and chin clotted with blood and grease, scraped open by the snow. He’s passing under where Peggy and Jim are now, tight against the front of the third car. There are more Germans standing around outside the train, clumped in little groups where Schmidt had boarded. Steve can smell their cigarettes, the leather of their boots. Dernier’s bag snags on a tie and Steve has to jackknife around to silently free it, casting his eyes upward as if he can see through the train floor. 

“You must’ve gotten a bad batch of this stuff,” Bucky says. “Too bad it didn’t leave you pretty like me.”

“There are worse fates,” Schmidt says, as Steve pulls himself up and under the thick cabling between the cars. The undercarriage is the same as the others, pistons and gears and other things Steve doesn’t know the name of. He doesn’t know the names of what he’s carrying in Dernier’s bag of tricks, either. Only what they do.

“It is interesting,” Schmidt says. “You went through nearly the same process I did. Only the maker was different. I would not have believed that Arnim could outdo Dr. Erskine, and yet here we both are.”

“Lucky me,” Bucky pants, and Schmidt laughs.

“Very lucky,” Schmidt says. “You are still alive, aren’t you? Despite -  _ these. _ ”

Bucky draws a long, ragged breath. Outside the train, Steve can hear shots. Dugan’s returning fire, muffled by the train and Steve’s bad ear. Schmidt’s escort turn their toes toward the sound but don’t move towards it. Plenty of time to finish off the rest of them. “Get him up towards the front of the car,” Steve says as quietly as he can. “I’ll put them there.”

Placement is important. Uncontained, the explosion will spread out underneath the train, losing the power needed to blow through the floor, and probably killing Steve in the process. He wedges two explosives into a crevice, angling each the way Dernier had showed him, to send the percussive force out and upwards. By now breathing in is like sucking air through a straw, and his vision is getting spotty.

“Barnes, can you move?” Peggy says. “Nod if you can hear us.”

“Get back,” Bucky says, urgently. “Get away from me.”

There’s a moment of silence on the radio, wherein Schmidt laughs. Relief spreads warm through Steve’s chest, loosening his lungs enough that he can gasp, “Okay, Carter - you two get to the other side of the car. I’m pulling back down here. Bucky, the bombs are up front, right under the door. See if you can get Schmidt out of the car altogether. You need a distraction? Monty, what can you do from your position?”

“We’ll lose eyes on Barnes,” Peggy objects.

“No time,” Bucky whispers.

“We’ll lose all of them if we wait much longer,” Steve says. He wiggles, kicks, and presses his boots against the undercarriage to get the leverage to turn around and crawl back the way he came from, away from what he can only hope the blast radius will be. Trusting that in the next car over, Peggy and Morita are doing the same.

Bucky says, louder, “What’s the point? Your side is losing. We’re halfway to Berlin. The Nazis are finished.” He sounds tired. Worn thin.  _ Come on, Bucky _ .  _ Come on, almost there.  _ The detonator is in Steve’s other hand, gripped tightly in numb fingers. He fights his body for every inch. 

“Legends and gods live on, Captain,” Schmidt says, and Bucky laughs - almost too softly to hear.

“Too bad I’m neither,” he says. There’s a ragged pause. “Just a kid from Brooklyn.”

Schmidt says, “A weakness of will. No drive to be great.” 

Bucky sounds somewhere far away. There’s a bubbling quality to his voice, as if he’s speaking from under water. “Had it… pretty good… so far. Nothing I’d… change.”

A splinter in the rail tears open Steve’s palm as he shoves himself back through the narrow space between the second car and third, snow burning in the cut, and he hits the button of his radio and says, “I’m clear, Bucky, do you have him?”

“Do it,” Bucky grits out, so Steve does.

The explosion is a sudden crack of sound, and a long, rippling echo. From under the train Steve sees the fire, the smoke, and then abruptly gray sunlight as the second car and then the engine lift entirely off the rail and topple over. The noise is tremendous, deafening. In the echoing silence afterward Steve can hear only his own heart beating.

He lifts the radio to his mouth. His hands are shaking. He can’t hear any of the Germans moving around, any noise from the spotter or the soldiers who had ambushed them. “Status report,” he says. “Come in, come in.”

“Mother of God,” Monty says, reverently. “We’re - we’re fine back here.”

“That was close,” Peggy says. “Thought we were going over too.”

“Bucky,” Steve says. “Is the Red Skull dead?”

Silence. Not even the crackle of the radio. Not the whisper of breath.

“Bucky?”

There’s a crunching noise from just ahead, and then the door of the third car flies open, Jim Morita rolling headlong onto the snow with the momentum of it. Peggy kneeling in the doorway, rifle cocked, her hair an ashy halo around her head. The cars ahead of them have overturned like a toy train, smashed and smoking. Steve leaves Dernier’s bag where it is, pushing up and out into the open air, and follows Morita stumbling into the ruins.

The Germans are in pieces around the toppled train. A foot here, a mostly empty pair of trousers there. They’d been standing together by the door, and Steve had aimed a bomb at them. He nearly steps on half a man’s face, lying serene and bloodless in the snow. Not even the brow is wrinkled.

The Germans inside are more intact, and burning - smoke clogs the air from their smouldering winter coats. Steve coughs and tugs Bucky’s coat up over his mouth, but paradoxically the warm air opens up his lungs. It’s dark inside, hard to see. The only light is a weak shaft of sun from the jagged hole Steve blew into the floor, clotted with ashes. 

It’s Steve who finds Bucky - who sees the angle of blue limbs in the debris, the five points of a star. He shouts for Morita, for help. Shouts Bucky’s name. Dim awareness of a body next to Bucky, a red and twisted face. Bucky isn’t moving at all.

“Jesus -” Morita chokes out. His hands hover over the shrapnel protruding from the Captain America costume, crosswise all the way through one red strap. Beside the twisted piece of metal is a hole big enough for Steve to stick three fingers into, and another high up on Bucky’s left arm. Enough blood that it’s almost soaked through the white parts of his armor.  There’s blood bubbled at the corners of Bucky’s mouth, too.

Safe and sound from submachine guns and pistols, Howard said - but of course machine guns use rifle ammunition.

There’s blood in Steve’s mouth from the cut on his palm. It’s squeezing out between his knuckles. Morita’s is shouting Steve’s name. When Steve doesn’t answer he rips Steve’s fist out of his mouth and puts it on Bucky’s shoulder, pressing hard until Steve shakes himself and starts pressing down too. There are tears on Morita’s cheeks, but his hands move with the confidence of long experience. 

It makes sense. Jim’s seen a lot of friends die.

 


	15. Chapter 15

 

In the end it takes Jim, Dernier, Monty and Dugan to carefully load Bucky onto the floor of the German truck. The trick will be to get him to the camp and its medical facilities without jogging the shrapnel: a quick death from blood loss instead of a lengthy one from sepsis. Peggy holds his head still as the truck bumps and rattles along the road. Gabe sits on the floor with them, one hand shading his face from the other soldiers, gulping down quiet sobs. There are sixteen survivors from their platoon escort, and nine casualties. No one speaks for twenty miles, except once. 

“Don’t worry,” one of the soldiers says to another. It’s the man who had Bucky autograph his rifle, who hasn’t looked away from Peggy’s blood smeared hands. “Cap always gets up.”

But he doesn’t. He wakes just for a moment as they arrive at the German camp. Dugan parks the truck as close as possible to what they think is the hospital, and they pile out to look for a stretcher. Steve stays, and when everyone is out of the truck he puts a hand over Bucky’s cheek.

For a moment Bucky’s eyes open. They’re vivid, empty blue in the cold light of the truck. He looks right at Steve and then through him, as if he doesn’t recognize Steve at all.

 

-

 

“Steve?”

Peggy’s shadow stretches across the floor. She picks her way carefully through the shamble of smashed tables and charred filing cabinets, her hands folded in front of her. 

“There’s a chair over there, if you’d like one,” Steve tells her.

“Oh,” she says, as she settles on the floor next to him, “I’ll be alright.”

She digs into her jacket pocket and produces a pale pink handkerchief, edged with lace. The last time Steve saw it was at Pine Camp in upstate New York, the edge of it sticking out of Gabe’s duffle bag like a naughty secret. “I never keep these clean,” Steve mutters, but wipes his face regardless, the fabric cool against his skin.

Peggy inspects her nails, and then the papers spread out along the floor. She leans over to pick one up: blueprints for a tank of preposterous size, bulky as a dinosaur. “Ambitious,” she says, and lets it fall fluttering back down to their feet.

“There’s a plane over there you’d never believe,” Steve says, gesturing with his chin at another pile of crumpled blueprints. He wraps his arms back around his knees, his bandaged hand dangling. 

They sit together in silence until finally, gently, Peggy says, “Jim’s going to start the surgery soon. Will you come?”

Steve shakes his head. “I can’t.”

“Mabel needs you there,” she says. “And - I don’t want you to be alone.”

His throat is too clogged to speak. His chest feels like it’s wet through, his limbs numb. It’s cold in the room, which must have been somebody’s office: the windows are cracked, and a little bit of snow has drifted through. He hasn’t been able to stop shivering. It’s funny, how the body forgets grief. The specific weight of it, the taste of this particular pain. “I never should’ve pulled the trigger,” he says, when he’s able.

Peggy sighs. “You didn’t know he’d been hit.”

Steve rests his cheek along his folded arms. The possibilities stretch out in his mind, roads not taken. If Gabe and Monty had provided covering fire for a force moving up inside the train. If Steve had thrown the bombs out into the waiting Germans instead. If Morita and Peggy had been able to break down the door to get to Bucky. If Phillips thought the Germans would never fall for a fake super soldier. If Steve had just let Bucky go back home where he belonged.  _ If, if, if.  _

He squeezes his eyes shut, and sees once again Bucky’s naked body, cut out of his Captain America uniform. How much blood there’d been. How dark the wounds had been on his shoulder, his stomach. Steve had kissed that stretch of skin only a few days ago. Had woken up with his nose pressed against the familiar landscape of Bucky’s chest. Had run his hands across the plane of Bucky’s stomach for longer than he knew what touching meant, what it could mean, how it could reshape a person’s world.

He opens his eyes. Blows his nose on Gabe’s handkerchief. Tucks it carefully away into his coat pocket to be washed later. And smiles at Peggy, even though the edges of it tremble. 

“I’ll come in a moment,” he says. 

But he doesn’t. He sits still and unmoving while the room grows dark around him, Bucky’s coat wrapped around his shoulders - which still smells like Bucky, under everything else. His mother would want it. There are books in Bucky’s pack too, that Steve could send to her. Letters tucked in between the pages, from her and from Becca and Esther. Two letters from Bucky that he hadn’t sent yet, on which Steve had doodled Swiss clocks and Swiss milkmaids. 

They shouldn’t have to hear about it from the Western Union man. They shouldn’t - 

Steve’s eyes are open and empty.

 

 

He’s still sitting there hours later when the door opens again, and Jim’s boots shuffle in the room. Steve can smell him approach: the copper smell of blood, laid over with vinegary rubbing alcohol. When Jim stops in front of him Steve is too afraid to look up. His whole body aches, knowing what comes next.

Jim kneels down on the cold floor. His boots smudge the blueprints, tear one wing off the ludicrous Nazi plane. When he doesn’t say anything Steve clears his throat, and unlocks a hand to place on Jim’s shoulder. It’s impossible to speak. He looks at Jim’s chest instead of his face. He says, “Thank you. I know you did everything you could.”

“Steve,” Jim says, and there’s something strange in voice. “Steve, there’s something you gotta see.”

 

-

 

The room Jim takes him to is an operating theater, with rows of wooden pews for spectators. The building is old enough that the room has a fireplace, and a skylight overhead when candles wouldn’t have been sufficient for surgery. Someone has hacked apart a few of the pews to build a fire, and the room is incongruously warm and cozy. 

Bucky is lying on the operating table, a nearly empty plasma bag still connected to his arm. For a moment Steve feels a cruel twist in his heart. There’s ruddiness in Bucky’s cheeks. Color in his naked limbs, which are slack and still. The heat of the fire, warming a corpse. 

Then Steve sees Bucky’s chest rise and fall, very shallowly.

“He’s still alive,” Steve says, and feels hope surge in his chest like a physical thing. “He made it through surgery. Jim, he’s -”

“He’s -” Jim says, and then can’t seem to find the words for it. He takes Steve’s elbow and pulls him forward until they’re standing directly over Bucky. “He’s,” Jim says again, and then swallows. Shakes his head. “Look.”

He peels back the bandage on Bucky’s left shoulder. For a moment Steve is sick at the sight of the ragged edges of the wound. But he can feel Jim watching him, waiting for him to see  _ something.  _ He looks again, letting his eyes blur until the dark clotted hole is no more than an impressionistic stain. When he sees what Jim is trying to tell him, it doesn’t make sense. The idea trickles up his spine and curls around his bum heart, gripping tighter the more he tries to push it away. 

Steve had stood back at a distance as Monty and Jim had unbuckled Captain America’s armor and laid him bare, but memories have always been like photographs for Steve. Easy enough to lay one over the other and see where they don’t line up.

He frowns. “Wasn’t that - ?” 

Jim’s whole body tenses up and he rises up onto his toes. He’s practically vibrating. “When I finished the surgery I sat with him for a while,” he says, his words clipped and deliberate. “But it was a long time, just waiting. Long enough I started to think, maybe he’ll make it through the night. Maybe I should patch him up for travel, just in case. I went to clean out his shoulder, and that’s what I found.”

“It’s smaller,” Steve says slowly, almost asking a question.

“Almost half an inch smaller,” Jim says. His fingernails dig into the operating table, which is still crusted with blood. 

“That’s not poss -” Steve says, and then stops. His hand is on Bucky’s chest above the wound. He can feel Bucky’s heartbeat in his fingertips, weak and thready but  _ there _ , alive. Alive. The skin beneath his hand is warm.

“Oh,” Steve whispers. He spreads his fingers and presses down lightly, carefully. “Oh, you fucking punk. You rotten, lying son of a bitch.”

Bucky’s brows knit together, just a little. The table he’s lying on is broad and cold. The lamps Zola had been using to light his experiments have been smashed and overturned. One of them has fallen crossways along the pews, where maybe Schmidt had sat while Zola worked. Waiting to see if this version of the serum had been successful where so many others had failed.

How had they known all along? Had there been others who survived the process? Had Hydra possessed the real formula all along?

Or had someone brought a film to Zola of a man bending steel and throwing barbells around like Charles Atlas? Had Schmidt heard rumors that the Russians would pay anything to create super soldiers of their own? Did he know that the Americans believed they could end wars with one man?

He looks up at Jim. “Who else knows about this?”

Jim shakes his head. “I came straight to you.”

Steve nods. “Go get them,” he says. “Don’t tell them anything yet, just bring ‘em back here. Peggy too.”

“She’s with the SSR,” Jim says. “She’ll tell them.”

“That’s a risk we’ll have to take,” Steve says. “We’re gonna need her help.”

“With what?” 

He wants to let out a laugh. It curls and bubbles in his throat and then settles into quiet calm. This is what they were trained for, after all. To raise a great multitude where none could exist; to erase tracks and plant false flags. To tell the biggest stories ever told, big enough that their enemies never question their reality. The plan unfurls in his mind like a map, each twist and turn clear. A solution worthy of a Hollywood epic. Three acts in technicolor. Duty and country, country and duty. And lots of human interest.  

Steve looks at Jim and says, “We have to kill Captain America.”

 

_ - _

 

Combat deception takes planning. Every detail must be carefully outlined in advance, the territory thoroughly scouted. Their unit had operated differently than the rest of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops; they’d brought with them no sound trucks or magnetic reels and had swiftly abandoned their bulky inflatables. But their days in the bocage had still been monotonous with surveillance, monitoring, and scouting. Recording shift changes, counting heads. The endless courtship of delivery men and cleaning women, wringing out details of each fuel depot and water plant, sketching layouts and escape plans. By the time Captain America showed his face, they knew each target inside and out. 

Careful forethought is the only way to make the illusion  _ real _ .

Jim reveals each bullet hole like a magic trick and shows them the reddened healing edges, the faded pink lines that hours ago were deep scratches from being bounced around in the armor. He leaves Bucky’s middle covered, but hovers one hand over where he’d pulled eight inches of jagged steel from Bucky’s gut. “He’d have already gone septic, with how big this hole is,” he says. “You’d be able to smell it.”

Bucky groans tightly through his teeth. His fingers twitch and shake around Steve’s, who stands on one side of the table with Jim. The rest of them are on the other side, Bucky in between. For a long time the only sound is the crackle of the fire and the creak of leather as Dernier shifts his feet. The look on Gabe’s face is unreadable until he turns away, wiping tears from his eyes.

“My trust did beget of him a falsehood,” Monty says finally, “in its contrary as great as my trust was. Which indeed had no limit.”

“Is now really the time for that, Limey?” Dugan asks.

“Did he tell you?” Gabe says very quietly, and Steve has to shake his head  _ no _ .

Peggy’s hanging back, still and silent by the fire. Jim looks at her, his eyes dark. “What would the government do if they got their hands on Barnes?”

“Life in a laboratory,” Monty says, “would be a best case scenario.”

“That’s not an option,” Steve says immediately.

Peggy’s lips thin. “I’m not any more pleased than you are,” she says. “But what of the good that could be done, even with half a serum? Barnes may not be able to throw tanks around, but if he can survive these kind of grievous wounds what else could be learned? How many lives could we save, knowing this is possible?”

“I think the Army’s a lot more interested in people who can throw around tanks,” Gabe says. “Maybe they do things a little more nicely in England, but our government has a track record for experimenting on poor folk in the name of ‘improving the human race’.”

“They can’t be trusted with this,” Jim says. 

“We have to tell them  _ something _ ,” Peggy says, frustrated.

“If we tell them Bucky was KIA, they’ll want the body,” Monty says. “If we tell them the Skull is dead, they’ll want the body.”

“We tell them nothing,” Dernier suggests. “We say nothing happened. We found nothing.”

“Sixteen guys saw Cap get gunned down,” Dugan says. “ _ If _ he gets up and walks out of here - sorry, Rogers - I’m guessing the SSR’s gonna have some questions about that.”

“They will,” Steve says, “unless we give them something else to believe.”

“I thought you were being a little quiet,” Gabe says, and Steve smiles grimly.

 

-

 

It takes most of the night to thrash out the details of the op. The office where Steve had waited for Bucky to die yields a treasure trove of information. Layouts of camp extensions, inventories of supplies. Memoranda of a half-dug base in a nearby mountain, as unfinished as the enormous plane whose blueprints are scattered about the room. Logs of experiments, prisoner names, extensive notes in what they can only assume is Arnim Zola’s hand. “You think you can counterfeit this?” Steve asks, and Gabe huffs.

“Give me an hour to practice,” he says .

Zola’s office also yields an ULTRA machine, which Jim attaches himself to with relish. Dernier spends his hours sifting through the wreckage for anything that can be repurposed for his uses, which are many; the months spent in covert operations has given him a keen eye for improvising explosive devices.

When dawn breaks they sleep in shifts. Dugan is dispatched to give orders to their surviving escort: cleaning up the barracks, consolidating supplies. On returning, he reports they’re all very anxious about Cap. “I told them we got new orders,” he says. “That Cap’s hard at work on a plan to defeat Hydra.” 

“So he is,” Steve mutters, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. 

“If Hydra still exists, now that we’ve cut off their head,” Gabe says. He and Steve had slept head to toe in front of the fire, or rather they’d laid head to toe and talked for hours about home, feeding most of Zola’s documents to the flames.

The Captain America costume is still damp when Dugan hands it over, scrubbed clean and bleached. He’d patched the holes as best as he was able, using Dernier’s favorite blue shirt and the tail end of a scarf he’d been working on, which he reassures Steve is nearly the same color red. The stitches are neat and even around the wide holes, and when Monty stands at a few yards distance, the effect is passable.

“Feels strange to be wearing this,” Monty says, looking down at himself. He’s shaved off his mustache.

“Sounds even stranger,” Jim says, wincing at his cool English tones.

Monty clears his throat and says, “Whaddayou, a wise guy? I’m a New Yorka. I wuz born on Toity Toid Street.”

“I’m ashamed to hear you talk like that,” Gabe tells him. “Who are you trying to be, Rocky Sullivan?”

“It sounded like Barnes to me,” Dernier says.

“At least they’re the same height,” Steve says. 

Bucky sleeps an artificial sleep the whole day through. Jim’s kept him under while his body does the hard labor of knitting itself back together. It’s slow going and makes for anxious hours. Twice Steve has to stop what he’s doing and make sure that it’s not all some cruel dream, that they’re not planning what could arguably be treason for a corpse. Once he surprises Dernier keeping the same watch.

For dinner they supplement their rations with hard cheeses and the best brandy any of them have ever tasted, unearthed from a storeroom full of dusty corners. Afterwards, Peggy takes Steve aside and says, “I’m not sure all of this will be enough.”

Steve rakes both hands through his hair. His hands are still smudged with oil and ash; they smell of smoke. There’s dried blood in the beds of his fingernails. “Not even the rest of the Nazis know what Hydra’s been up to,” he says. “Schmidt kept Zola from them, and all his weapon development. He could have built this thing.”

“That’s not what concerns me,” she says. “I’ve seen the sort of thing Howard builds in his spare time. This - this  _ Valkyrie _ , these specially powered bombs - a man like Schmidt could achieve these things.”

Steve shakes his head. “So what am I missing?”

“You want to kill a man,” Peggy says. “But he’s meant to be so much more than that, isn’t he?”

“Gods and legends live on,” Steve says. 

“Schmidt was right about that, at least,” Peggy says, and shakes her head. “He was never intended to be only a man, not by any of you - Erskine, Schmidt, Zola. Even you, Steve.”

Steve looks back towards the others. They’re subdued, sitting close together. Monty has his pen and paper out, but he sits watching the fire instead of writing. “I wanted him to be a hero,” he admits. “I knew I’d never be one.”

Her eyes soften but hold no pity. “The SSR never wanted a hero,” she says. "They wanted a weapon. If we want Captain America’s death to mean something, the  _ right  _ something - the kind that will make sure no one’s still thinking about how they can get their hands on that super soldier - we can’t just kill a weapon. We need the man, a real and  _ human  _ man, to die a hero. To show it isn’t just what we’ve been fighting for - but how we’ve been fighting for it.”

“What are you suggesting?” Steve asks.

“Wishfulness is a great flaw in intelligence - but it can bring meaning and comfort in a world that makes no sense. It may be the thing that wins wars. It matters, I think, what we’re wishing for.”  She bites her lip, and laughs ruefully. “Which is to say, we need to give Captain America something more than love of country to die for.”

 

-

 

They send the first message to London at 0740.  _ Arnim Zola has been captured. Given the valuable information he has provided, and in exchange for his full cooperation, Doctor Zola is being remanded to Switzerland. Please prepare suitable transportation. _ At this distance it’s almost inevitable that the message will be intercepted, but for added ease Morita uses the codes they were given back in Normandy, almost certainly broken by now.

“But we got no idea where this Zola character is,” Dugan had said, when they were talking it over. “Won’t he have something to say about it?” 

“Who cares?” Peggy says, sounding for a moment just like Bucky. “Zola has very little chance of seeing the end of the war with Schmidt taken out of play. But he’s still a target of the SSR, one that I’d like to see brought to justice. Either we’ve just signed his death warrant, or he’ll defect and stand trial for his crimes.”

The second message is sent an hour later, for relay from Zurich to Liechtenstein.  _ Request approved, reinforcements en route to your position.  _ A reply to a message lost, perhaps - enough to throw some confusion about who is communicating to whom. The Italian campaign had been gutted for Operation Overlord, and reinforcements for the invasion of northern Italy had been trickling in for months from three separate divisions. Coupled with Allied bombardment over Austria and the advancement of the Russians from the east, even a short message would muddy the waters about who was asking for troops in the Alps, and what troops could be sent at such short notice.

Their transport is loaded and ready to go. Captain America comes to bid farewell to their platoon escort, who are being left behind to guard the Hydra camp. He shakes their hands and nods gravely as they tell him it was an honor. No one seems to notice that he doesn’t speak or that his upper lip looks a little pink. 

The fork in their roads is a bumpy hour through windy mountains. They cut Bucky’s morphine and without it he’s stumbling fitfully towards consciousness. “He’s gonna be in a lot of pain when he wakes up,” Jim tells Steve. “It’s not gonna be pretty. But try and keep him clear if you can. Wash out the wounds and rebandage them when you find somewhere to stop, at least by tonight. Sterilize the water first.”

They’ll turn north towards Salzburg. The unfinished Hydra base lies somewhere in between, below the tree line. Jim will use ULTRA to send the remaining signals from there, panicked messages notifying of an approaching Allied force. Updates of a battle that isn’t happening as they lay Dernier’s explosives throughout the base to conceal a force that never existed. 

“Save some for your team, in case there are any Germans nearby,” Steve tells him.

“Penicillin injections every six hours until you run out, not before,” Jim says doggedly, as if Steve hadn’t spoke. “Not even if he’s up and complaining he doesn’t need ‘em anymore.”

He keeps up the running commentary as they load Bucky carefully into the back seat of the second vehicle and helps pile blankets on top of him. Their escape will be in a nondescript German staff car that’s seen better days and is barely big enough to fit Bucky’s long legs. Like Monty’s accent, it won’t hold up under scrutiny, but it should be enough to get them off the mountains and close to the Swiss border - if they aren’t found by the Germans first, if they can’t find safe passage across the border, if the SSR doesn’t believe Peggy’s story,  _ if, if, if _ .

For a long time the seven of them stand in a circle without speaking. The storm has cleared, and sunlight sparkles off the mountains. It feels as if they’re standing on the top of the world, or at the very least a high precipice, looking over the edge.

“If Cap were here,” Steve says finally, “he’d have a pretty good speech for you. All I can say is thank you.”

“Yeah yeah,” Dugan says. “We already saw how the movie ends. Freedom and sacrifice, yadda yadda. You too, Rogers.”

Dernier steps forward and takes Steve’s hand in a tight grip. “C’ é tait une grande plaisir, servir avec vous.”

He turns to Monty, who smiles, gentle and raw looking without the cover of his mustache. He’s left the shield in their truck, his face naked of Cap’s mask. “I’ve been racking my brains for the perfect quote,” he says, and shakes Steve’s hand. “But it seems that words have deserted me also. Godspeed, Rogers.”

“Godspeed,” Jim grumbles, and sticks his own hand out. He jerks a chin towards the mess of blankets concealing his friend. “You tell him - aw, hell. You tell him I’ll be on the radio, okay? You tell him to get a message to me.”

“I will,” Steve promises.

He turns to Peggy, who is looking at him with large, sad eyes. Her spine is as straight as ever. He takes both her hands within his own regardless, and says, “I’m sorry for what’s waiting for you on the other side of this.”

“It won’t be all bad,” she says, and she and Gabe share a smile. “You two will spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulders.”

“What life?” Steve asks. “I’m already dead.” And so he is; dead for days, according to the reports the Commandos will make to the SSR. Killed during the train attack that wounded Captain America and lead to the capture of Doctor Arnim Zola. Zola, who may or may not turn up in Switzerland, but whose notes will - stating that he was unable to duplicate Erskine’s serum. 

“Don’t be an ass, you know what she means,” Gabe sighs, and draws Steve into a tight embrace. “You sure you can drive that thing?”

“We’re about to find out,” Steve murmurs into Gabe’s coat. “You got the letters for his family?”

“I got ‘em,” Gabe says. There’s nothing incriminating in the pages. No mention of Captain America, no heroics. Nothing but  _ I love you’ _ s,  _ I miss you _ ’s, the margins full of little drawings to make Bucky’s sisters smile. “You be safe, y’hear? Take care of each other.”

“You too,” Steve whispers, and takes one last breath of home.

He doesn’t look back as he points their car west, and if the road blurs with tears every once in awhile that’ll be between him and God. The air warms up as they pass down through the tree line, but it doesn’t really get any easier to breathe. On the bench next to him, the radio chirps - picking up the first of Jim’s messages. They’re staging the opening attack, then.

_ Captain America’s motorcycle roars through the woods, easily outpacing the six Hydra soldiers hot on his tail. Little did they know that the motorcycle had been built by Howard Stark himself! He triggers a tripwire, yanking two Hydra goons off their motorcycles. A belch of fire from his exhaust pipe takes care of two more. _

_ He approaches the wide concrete gates of the base, and is confronted by the squat silhouette of a tank. But it’s no trouble for Cap’s shield - or for the powerful rockets designed by American ingenuity! The tank is destroyed in one powerful blast, and Cap aims his motorcycle up the steep ramp, flipping up and over Hydra’s measly defenses.  _

_ Over the gates, he smashes his way through Hydra soldiers - wham! Blam! His superhuman strength makes quick work of the evil foot soldiers. But as he knew he would be, he’s quickly surrounded. All is going to plan. His trusted Howling Commandos await his signal. _

He can picture it in his mind’s eye, clear as if he were watching it up on a screen. As if he were lying in the narrow cot he’d shared with his mother as a child, a toy soldier in each hand, telling himself stories. 

It had been how he’d learned to draw, in fact. He’d always wanted to save the best scenes for Bucky.

_ The Red Skull’s base has been overrun with soldiers, but the villain himself eludes Captain America. It’s not until he hears the whir of great propellers that he realizes Schmidt is about to carry of his most dastardly plan - the devastation of America with his mighty Valkyrie, an experimental Nazi plane designed to resist radar and all known forms of tracking. _

_ “We have to get to that plane,” Cap says grimly. “Our American way of life depends on it. The war itself depends on his madness not reaching our shores.” _

_ But brave Agent Carter is already ahead of him, and she roars into view in the passenger seat of Schmidt’s own car. “Get in!” she shouts, and they begin a desperate chase. Ahead they can see daylight through the open hangar doors. Cap ducks underneath the propellers, which bounce harmlessly - KLANG! - off his shield. He readies himself to leap -  _

The car skids on the icy road, and Steve yanks irritatedly on the wheel. His stomach is a mass of knots. They pass an elderly civilian truck trundling its way up the mountain. The driver spares a curious glance towards Steve.

He wonders what they’ll tell Bucky’s family. Both of them lost at once, with no bodies to bury. Would the SSR tell Mrs Barnes that her son had died a hero, wearing a flag across his chest? Or would he and Steve be disavowed, hushed up, classified?

Erased from history.  _ You will cease to exist _ , Phillips had said.

_ \- “Wait!” Carter says, and her slim hand finds a way to Cap’s chest. He leans down to her, and she up to him, and her kiss is a promise he hopes desperately to keep. There’s no time for words, for vows - he must turn away from her, for all of their futures depend on him catching this plane, and stopping the Red Skull’s evil plan. _

The road bends and turns and suddenly clears, dropping off into a great wide valley flush with sunlight. He can see little towns in the distance, smoke from chimneys. They aren’t nearly to the border yet, and from so high above the world the distance seems impossible.

Steve pulls the truck carefully to the side of the road. There’s sunlight streaming through the windows of the car. The engine ticks as it cools down. The radio antenna clicks as he pulls it to its full length. He listens to the sound of Bucky breathing until he can’t anymore, until he has to bury his face in his hands.

_ A cold wind whistles through the broken windows of the Valkyrie. Below is an endless expanse of sky, clouds, snow, nothing. The instruments laid out in front of the Captain read, in lights bright enough to be on Broadway: NEW YORK. His hands fly over the panels, but they tell him nothing.  _

_ The Red Skull is dead, but his evil plans may yet come to pass. _

_ If Howard Stark were there - if Peggy Carter were there - if his trusted Howling Commandos were there - but there’s no time to spend on ifs. The plane is moving fast, and every moment he wastes could mean the deaths of thousands in the city where he was born. _

_ Cap looks up. The sun is streaming through the windows. The cold wind pricks his eyes with tears. There’s only one choice to be made, but he can’t make it without hearing the voice of his best girl … one last time. _

There’s a rustle from the back seat, the sound of shifting blankets and the creak of the leather seat. “Steve?” 

It’s hoarse, barely above a whisper. Steve twists around in his seat. “I’m here! Bucky, Bucky. I’m right here.”

“We  _ really  _ gotta quit meeting like this,” Bucky grits out. He takes a deep breath, his face contorted with pain. “What the hell happened? I thought I was a goner.” His words are slurred together. His eyes are heavy-lidded. His hands find the bandages on his belly, and he hisses between his teeth.

“It’s a long story,” Steve says. He wipes his eyes, his chest heaving. His face aches already from smiling. “I’ll tell you about it when we drive.”

Bucky cranes his head, and Steve watches him take in his surroundings. His eyes flicker, watching the dust float golden through the morning air. They’re the most beautiful color blue Steve has ever seen.  “Where’re we going?” he asks. 

“Anywhere you want,” Steve says. “How about the Grand Canyon?”

Bucky’s eyebrows knit together, confused. “That in California?” he asks. Steve rests his forehead against the seat between them, grinning helplessly.

“Yeah Buck,” he says, “the one in California.” 

“Oh,” Bucky breathes, and grins bright and beautiful up at Steve. “You’re coming too?”

The radio beeps: two long, two short, one long. “You’re stuck with me, pal,” Steve tells him. “There’s just one last thing we gotta do.”

He picks up the headset. His heart is squeezing at him; it’s not hard to sound frantic as the call is answered.  “Come in,” he says, “this is Captain America, do you read me?”

Bucky makes a curious sound from the back seat.  “Captain,” Jim says, and then there’s a commotion on the other side. Peggy, pushing him away from the radio so she can talk to her love. All according to script: “Darling, is that you? Are you alright?”

“Steve?” Bucky says from the back seat, and then groans sharply as he tries to sit up.

“Peggy, Schmidt’s dead,” Steve says into the radio, squeezing his eyes shut. He reaches his free hand over the back of the seat. After a moment he feels Bucky’s fingers wrap around his own and hold on tight. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you everyone for reading!
> 
> You can find us on tumblr at [hansbekhart](http://hansbekhart.tumblr.com/), [samtalksfunny](http://samtalksfunny.tumblr.com/) (Scappodaqui), and [artgroves](http://artgroves.tumblr.com/)/[albymangroves](http://albymangroves.tumblr.com/), with story art posted [in this tag](http://artgroves.tumblr.com/tagged/A-Contest-of-Stories/)


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